iPad's most disruptive features

Here's a brief list of less-than-totally-obvious-but-hugely-significant things you need to know

Below is a list of the some of the most interesting features of the iPad, from the perspective of market disruption.

Size: As good as TV
Considering that a 9.7 inch screen held a foot from your face looks a hell of a lot bigger than 50” plasma TV sitting on your wall, this is as good for movies as sitting in your living room, (for up to 2 people, let’s say). The screen is beautiful and viewable from almost any angle.

- Screen: 9.7”
- Device: 9.6” x 7.5” (slightly smaller than a magazine, slightly bigger than Kindle 2, which is 8" x 5.3").
- Depth: 0.5”, curved.

Price: unlike the iPhone, this is giftable.

Yes, $499 is great, but the most important price fact is that there’s no contract required for the data connection. That makes this device GIFTABLE. You can’t give an iPhone for Christmas in the U.S. becomes it comes tethered to a $100/ month charge for two years. But with the iPad, you can decline the data connection, or cancel at anytime. That means this will sell like crazy next Christmas and is fair game for birthdays, bar mitzvahs, etc. Market penetration will be huge, which is why Apple’s stock jumped at the announcement of the price (of course, Apple probable leaking a $1000 price point to the WSJ a few weeks back helped with the price wow-power today).

- $499 for 16GB and Wifi connection only
- $829 for 64 GB and 3G cell connection
- Data plans cost $15-$30/ month but come with NO CONTRACT. AT&T only Battery Life

iBooks Store: Other e-readers just became too expensive.
Everything the Kindle is just became a much better app on iPad. It’s color and has Apple’s beautiful UI and ease of purchase, and has partneres with 5 major publishers with more to come. Kindle will need to lower its price (even at $260, most folks will want to save just a little more to get an iPad), or become a hell of a lot cooler.

No Flash: NOT a laptop replacement
When Steve demoed the iPad, the telltale blue box indicating the absence of a Flash plugin signaled that Flash videos (the most common format on the web) will not be viewable from the browser. That means Apple’s claim that this is “the best way to browse the web” is dead wrong. 

Will it save the Newspaper Industry?
NO. The New York Times demonstrated their iPad app onstage at the event. It looks disappointingly like their website. Newspapers are not saved yet.

On the iPad the competition for eyeballs will be fierce: awesome games, books, hundreds of thousands of other apps. It doesn’t seem like Steve is giving Big Media any kind of special treatment in the device itself. It doesn’t start up with the morning’s news or make any media outlet a default dock application.

But it does give Big Media a way to save themselves. If Big Media re-allots their capital to focus on feature-rich coverage only they have the money to produce (picture interactive 360-degree videos in Haiti minutes after the Earthquake, graphs of economic data with variables you can change by manipulating them with your fingers on-screen, a side-bar to a story about email that let’s you compare the number of messages in your iPad inbox with the national average with one touch, etc.). When Big Media starts hiring more developers and less of everything else, they’ll be able to sell that content through the iPad.

Till then, NYT, you’re still toast because this, even on a frickin iPad, is still boring: