Disclaimer, in case you didn’t know for some reason: I have a MacBook and an iPhone and I enjoy them very much.

The iPad is intriguing. I have seen many people ask why they would want one. I think Apple essentially presented several use cases (eReading, couch surfing, airplane video watching), but it boils down to this: if you’re in the market for something that’s cheaper and less useful than a laptop but is more expensive and useful than an iPhone, the iPad is your device.

I am just curious as to how big that market is.

A friend of mine has an iPhone and Apple desktop. He doesn’t do work when he’s mobile, so he is interested in this device. For me, I can’t justify one right away. I would not get the more expensive 3G model, so I’d be stuck with just a WiFi connection, which means mostly home use. Since I already have a laptop as my main computer that I can bring with me, I don’t see the iPad use case working for me.

In terms of striking the balance between a cheaper laptop and a more useful iPhone, they leaned more towards the iPhone. However, they brought along many iPhone shortcomings – namely, multitasking and Flash in the browser. Therefore, you cannot have Pandora streaming, have your IM client going, and also work on something in Pages at the same time. With a $500 iPad (which Josh Gruber says is fast, fast, fast), you can only do one thing at a time. This just kills it for me.

I don’t think a big enough deal is being made about the fact that Apple is using its own Apple A4 chip in the device that makes it “fast, fast, fast.” Apple bought P.A. Semi and is now designing their own ARM-based chips in house. So, from this, the iPad is faster. I would like to think the processor can handle more than one application at a time, though. Yes, you could say that the iPad would bog down running too many apps, but so too can the MacBook. People expect multitasking and, if Apple could design an elegant system to do so, they should. Essentially, my argument boils down to this: Apple can’t possibly have unitasking as a written-in-stone design goal; at some point, they are going to have to introduce multitasking. It seemed like the introduction of the iPad, with its wickedly-fast processor, was as good of a time as any.

John Timmer, Science Editor of Ars Technica, nails it for me (scroll to the bottom of the page to read his thoughts directly):

Steve Jobs very explicitly placed the iPad in the category class between the phone and notebook, and it very nicely splits the difference between the two. And that’s precisely why I’m a bit disappointed by it—it doesn’t share enough of the features of either one of those two devices to actually make it useful to me.

When I leave the apartment for anything beyond local errands, I’m almost invariably carrying both a cell phone for communicating and a laptop for getting work done. A truly useful device would be one that could let me leave one of those devices and its added bulk, cables, and worries about charge status at home. The iPhone went a little way towards that dream—it was a phone, but its ability to handle a bit of web browsing and some light e-mail meant that leaving the laptop at home was possible in a few additional circumstances—but, for the most part, I’m still stuck lugging two devices.

The iPad doesn’t fix that. It’s clearly not a phone, so my phone would still have to come with me. It would do a better job of e-mail and web browsing than the iPhone but, if I’m carrying one of those anyway, that’s not a huge help. On the other side of its category divide, the iPad might add a few more cases where a laptop is unnecessary, but very few. I’m a touch typist; I take notes on presentations while watching the speaker, and I am often writing in one application while looking over a document in a second. With no physical keyboard and no multitasking, the iPad simply wouldn’t work for me. It’s just too limited to mean I could leave my laptop home any more often than I already do.

Apple looks like it nailed its target of creating a truly distinct device that’s somewhere in between the phone and the laptop. And, for precisely that reason, it doesn’t seem like it would be all that useful to me.