The iPad will change everything

How big will the tablet craze be? Trip Hawkins—a tech-industry veteran who once worked at Apple, then founded videogame giant Electronic Arts, and currently is CEO of Digital Chocolate, a game maker—says that as Google and others rush into the tablet-computer space, the market is going to explode. Within a decade there will be 1 billion tablet computers in the world, he predicts, adding that even then, “I’m probably being conservative.” Paul Saffo, a tech forecaster and professor at Stanford University, expects Apple to roll out a family of other iPad models—a small one the size of a paperback, a big one the size of two magazine pages—perhaps as soon as this fall. (Apple won’t confirm, natch.) Further out, we might have tablets on plastic sheets that you could roll up or fold like a map—”maybe by the second term of the Chelsea Clinton administration,” Saffo says.

When designers at Wired, the tech magazine, created a stunning demo of what a magazine might look like on a tablet like the iPad—with interactive graphics, videos embedded into stories, and an advertisement that let you spin a car around and see it from all sides—many of us in the media business were blown away. And that’s just the beginning. The main thing to know about the iPad is that right now nobody, not even Steve Jobs himself, really knows how this device will be used. “With the iPad, a lot of people are hoping there’s a killer app that we just can’t conceive of yet,” says Peter Farago, vice president of marketing at Flurry Analytics, which studies how people use mobile apps. Flurry started tracking iPad use a few months ago—these were test units inside Apple—and found the biggest use appears to be games. Looking ahead, Farago says, “there are basic questions, almost anthropological questions: How am I going to use this through my day? Are there going to be things that just blow my head off, and I just haven’t seen it yet?”