Imagine the possibilities with iPad

Consider this: you walk in to a coffee shop or restaurant, sit down and pull out your iPad. The iPad finds the establishment’s free Wi-Fi connection and as soon as it’s connected you get an offer to download a number of things. This could be the place’s menu, some free magazines and newspapers, and more.

Or why not this? At the gate at the airport, where you sit and wait just before you on board the plane, you would get offers of all the newspapers and magazines you usually get offered on the plane. Then you have access to all of them during your flight right there on your iPad. Also on the plane, on the back of the seat in front of you, there’s a space for fitting your iPad. It snaps into place and taps into the plane’s Wi-Fi system so you can navigate the in-flight entertainment menu and watch TV and movies.

Or? You’re walking the isles of GITEX in Dubai and you don’t see lots of brochures anywhere. Instead, when you walk up to a stand, you can just point your iPad’s Bluetooth to another Bluetooth device with the same name as the company whose stand it is, and then you receive the documents in digital format.

The imagination is the only thing standing in the way of achiving this and so much more. My very simple examples will probably look silly in 6-12 months time when the iPad has been out a while and software developers and businesses have come up with their ideas for what this can be.

Of course there’s no reason that any of this has to be done with iPad. Indeed it could be done with most smartphones, netbooks, computers etc. But I bet you that those who provide these services will have their imagination going by the iPad like nothing before in the same way that iPhone has stirred things up like no other smartphone has. I think it’s fair to say that iPhone has been the catalyst for truly imaginative smartphone uses much more so than any other comparable device.

So what kind of uses do you see for iPad?