Stevie Jobs yesterday announced the much-anticipated iPad, a tablet device that he says fills the gap between smartphones and laptops.  There have been a flurry of articles since then for and against the iPad, mainly focusing on what features it has or is missing, but I’d like to look at it from a higher level, looking at the product positioning and the problems it is trying to solve.

In introducing the iPad, Steve asserts that it is “better (than smartphones and laptops) at these tasks”: browsing, email, photos, video, music, games, eBooks.  But the product he then demonstrated didn’t seem to be better at any of those tasks.

• Browsing and email: these will always be easier on a laptop that has a physical, full-size (or close to full-size) keyboard with a mouse/touchpad/pointing device. The iPad’s touchscreen does not make web-browsing or email easier, nor does its small size.  The iPad will be adequate for short email or browsing sessions, but for many of us our smartphone is already good enough for that.
• Photos, video and music: it’s a nice photo browser, but to watch movies you’ll need some sort of stand.  The hard drive (64GB max) is too small to be good at storing any of these – it would fill up with 10 DVDs, and I know many people whose music collections alone are larger than 64GB.  To upload pictures from your camera to the iPad, you’ll need to stock up on dongles because it only has one 30-pin port for connectors (no USB).  This device (being based on iPod/iPhone software) is clearly intended to complement a laptop or PC with larger storage capacity, not replace it.
• eBooks: this is the one application in which the iPad outshines smartphones and laptops.  And it could be argued that the addition of color (neato!) makes it better than the Kindle, but for people who read for long stretches the Kindle’s e-ink screen will still make it the better option, assuming they aren’t reading magazines or textbooks that rely on color.

Apple lost sight of the fact that tech devices must simplify our lives.  The iPod made it easy to listen to music (and later, watch movies) on the go.  The iPhone gave us a world of applications with a slick interface in our pockets.  It let us take pictures without a camera and navigate without a dedicated GPS, and it let us do a myriad of light computing tasks without a laptop.  The iPod and iPhone both revolutionized their markets and changed the way we live, but the iPad fails in this regard.

The iPad is too big to be truly mobile, and it’s too small and limited to replace a laptop.  Rather than simplifying my life, the iPad is making it more complicated – it’s a third device I have to maintain, load media onto, and buy dongles for.  And all this starts at $499?  No thank you, Apple.

Even Hitler doesn’t want one.

For more details, here’s a sampling of the extensive coverage out there:

• Defective by Design’s Protest of Apple’s DRM
• Mashable’s “Comprehensive Guide” to the iPad
• Engadget’s Live Blog from the iPad Launch Event
• Gizmodo’s 8 Things that Suck about the iPad
• Lifehacker on The Problem with the iPad

Mashable this morning reports that HP is releasing a digital picture frame called the Dreamscreen.  At first glance this thing looks like a tablet PC or perhaps even an e-reader, each of which would be great, but…it’s really just a big iPod.  Not even an iPod Touch.

The Dreamscreen will show pictures, play music, and show movies, all things that digital picture frames already do.  It will connect to the Internet over your wifi, so you can…no, no web browsing…so you can use Facebook, Snapfish, or check weather reports.  Who doesn’t need another way to get weather reports?

HP boasts that the Dreamscreen has “touch-enabled controls” which fooled Mashable into saying it has a touchscreen, but really this just means the controls are dark and hidden until you touch them, but they’re just regular old buttons.  The lack of a touchscreen means that the virtual keyboard they provide is navigated using their remote control – you have to scroll to each letter you want to type and hit “okay”.  If tiny little phones can have keyboards, why can’t this 10″ tablet?  I am NOT using Facebook with a hunt-and-peck keyboard I control with a remote.

Ultimately, I have no idea why HP would release this thing.  The Dreamscreen just doesn’t fill any gaps in the market.  It isn’t as useful or versatile as a Netbook or tablet PC, and it’s more expensive than a digital picture frame.  The glossy UI is still quite clunky, so the approach of targeting entry level users with ease-of-use isn’t going to work.  It definitely won’t attract many buyers at $249 for the 10″ or $299 for the 13″.

If HP was paying attention to the market, they’d give us a touchscreen wifi device with almost full PC functionality (or at least web browsing and media playback), ideally with an e-reader built in, all for $250.  Many netbooks aren’t far off from this spec already, save the touchscreen.  A product like that would sure scare the Kindle team, but for now they can breathe easy.

I hope the Dreamscreen is just HP’s way to dip its toe in the water and get its manufacturing line set up for a real tablet PC…we shall see.

According to the laboriously-named Participatory Media Network, 99% of 18- to 24-year-olds have profiles on “social networks,” but only 22% of people in that age group use Twitter.  In their press release about the survey, the PMN concludes that Twitter “has yet to catch on” with Gen Y’s, and Cnet’s Caroline McCarthy parrots the PMN’s press release in her post “Young adults haven’t warmed up to Twitter.”

In what alternate universe does a service that after just over two years in existence already has a 22 percent market share count as something that has yet to catch on?  This is exactly what happens when market researchers trained in the 60′s are allowed to research things they don’t understand.  Any new online service would be thrilled to have a 22% market share of Gen Y, particularly a service that requires them to actually post content publicly to participate, rather than consuming content or having private conversations as they do on most social networks.

PMN is showing that they are hopelessly out of touch by positioning Twitter against the entire social networking space at large – it’s like saying “90% of adults 18-24 have cars, but only 20% are Toyota – Toyota has yet to catch on!”  Yet again I am severely disappointed by market researchers, as well as the press who mindlessly regurgitate these releases.