No doubt you’ve heard the much-hyped iPad launched over the Easter weekend, all 800,000 of them. After trawling through my inbox of industry emails, each giving their two bobs worth, I have distilled in 2 bullet points what I found the most important insights in how it will impact the way we consume information.

How will people use it?

1. Leisure and entertainment: After spending the whole weekend tinkering around with it Ian Schafer from Advertising Age made a valid distinction: It’s designed for content consumption, not creation. People using it are really impressed with the way it renders websites, video and the possibility of apps and games .
2. They will be just ‘lying around the house’ in 2-3 years time. Within 3 years the stripped down versions of the iPad (16GB wireless) are likely to retail at $199. Suddenly households can afford to have a few of them around the house. Henry Blodget predicts they will be left around the house like today’s books, newspaper and magazines for anyone in the household to pick up and use.

When is all of this likely to impact Australian customers like yours?

‘Late April’ is when first orders are set to arrive in Australia. In terms of when it will start to reach the tipping point of Australian customers that’s a tricky question… If we look back to predictions above on when they’ll be affordable for households it looks like 2-3 years. However, there is going to be multiple other platforms entering the market within the next 12 months.

What is the potential for brands?

• Touchscreen advertising will enable interactive, intuitive ways of navigating through information. For instance scrolling your fingers around a product shot could turn the object around in 3 dimensions. Imagine using this for a car, appliance or house.
• Video will play a big part
• Interactive magazines (instead if flicking through magazines we’ll be sliding and side swiping. People can zoom on copy and photos. They can activate video, select and share content. See Wired, Sports Illustratedand Time Magzine
• Games

Apps – here's what already launched after just one month

from Aaron Collyer, Longtail Technical Director
 

With the release of the iPad brings a new device for people to use to surf the web. As the iPad is different to a standard desktop/laptop or mobile device there are a few things that you might need to think about in regards to how your website is displayed on the iPad.

Screen Resolution
I haven’t read this anywhere yet but I would assume screen resolution of the iPad is worth giving some thought. Holding the iPad in landscape the screen is 1024x768 but if the user rotates the device to portrait the resolution will become 768x1024. Meaning all the websites that have been designed to fit the width of 1024 and above will suddenly need to scroll horizontally to view the content. From an advertising point of view this will cause issues as it means one of the most common advertising areas on websites will suddenly be outside of the standard screen area (even though the flash version of the ad won’t work anyway).

Flash Content
Along with the iPod Touch and iPhone the iPad still does not support Adobe Flash. Obviously this will cause huge issues with heavily flashed based websites. A more common issue however is playing videos online. Flash based videos players are found all over the web meaning if the website does not implement an Apple Device version of the video player it simply won't work for the user. Major sites were getting ready for the launch of the iPad and have optimised their sites to work around this issue. Here is a list of a few sites and what they needed to change. http://www.cyberjournalist.net/news-sites-optimized-for-the-ipad/

Flash Advertising
From the above comments it’s obvious that ad’s created in flash will also not work on the iPad. If the site serving the ad hasn’t handled this issue the flash based ad is replaced with a static image as an alternative, the issue with this being the visual impact that the ad normally serves is lost. There is some hope for advertising with a company that has been developing a service that will allow flash ad’s to play on mobile devices as well as the iPad. http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/news/advertising/5822.html

Redirecting to Mobile Sites
Another issue being found with the release of the iPad is when users are visiting a site using the iPad the site picks up that they are not using a standard web browser/Device and redirects the user to the mobile version of the site. Mobile versions of sites are made to fix a tiny screen compared to the iPad so you could imagine the annoyance some users are experiencing. This is an easy fix for the web masters as when an iPad is being used to browse their site they need to either deliver them to the standard site or redirect them to an iPad optimised version of the site.

Apple has released a document for web masters to use to prepare their website for the iPad. http://developer.apple.com/safari/library/technotes/tn2010/tn2262.html