I know this is easy to say now: the iPad will be a revolutionary device which will change the way we interact with the city, media and each other. While some friends have said that this is only a scaled-up iPod Touch, the iPad is not merely an incremental size increase; rather the iPad will dominate, and make redundant, every low-cost, low-end, laptop in the market. And we now live in the Star Trek world.
My daily amount of reading has increased every year due to technology: the web, then blogs and newspapers online, then Google FeedReader, my iPhone, soon the iPad. We are awash in media, with the results only beginning to be seen. We are moving into an age of localized media, in a global setting. Think about this for a second: books, music and video on demand, hopefully from indies as well as the huge publishers. The New York Times writ large and glossy – I would pay a subscription for this and dump my physical delivery.

Apple created tools to harness, and profit from, distributing media from creators large and small. If you run a magazine, you can make an app and create a subscription model inside the app using already in place developer tools. The Atlantic, Time, etc would be fools if they didn’t have a large group of coders in a back room somewhere taking advantage of this. Even my favorite blogs should begin testing out this model: Gothamist should begin experimenting with products and services which exploit their hyper-local focus – this could be video interviews, audio, etc – which would augment the daily blog. Would you pay for AutoTune the News? Even 50 cents? I don’t know – but established media companies have got to experiment, or they will wither and die.
All of this is why alarmist reports about kids spending 8 hours a day using media is silly: humans are connecting with other humans on a scale never seen before, at distances never seen ever! Our primate brains developed in small social groups, with a limited roaming range; but now, our social graph is being deliberately charted (Facebook, Netflix, etc) and through social tools the number and reach of our social group is increasing dramatically. I see this all as a net positive, as humans scale up and integrate with each other.

While our media diet will surely change, our interaction with the physical environment and the polis will have the largest change. There are already applications to show you invisible artifacts of the city, such as the above New York City Subway app on your iPhone. Imagine how you would use the city (like Adam’s The City is Here for you to Use) with tools available on the iPad. I would suggest that we will become both more introverted and paradoxically more extroverted through the use of digital tools. How many people do you see walking around the city with iPods on or their face buried in an iPhone? Yet we Yelp, share video and photos, and our location data with any and all. This will be a paradox for the coming age.
My prediction: the iPad will sell like hotcakes and become the basis for any and all portable device larger than a phone and less capable than a desktop or high-end laptop.