Jeremy Gilbert : Design Thinker, Professor and Multimedia Journalist

While sitting in an Apple Education Seminar on software development for the iPad and iTouch yesterday, I started doing some research into iPad user interface design, and I’ve run into an interesting question.

No, it’s not how liberally Steve Jobs borrowed from Orson Scott Card’s vision of Ender’s desk — although that was a good excuse to re-read the brilliant Ender’s Game. But it dealt with where exactly does the iPad fit into the spectrum of smart phone to laptop computer.

For me this question involved thinking about how I would use an iPad. What makes my iPhone smarter than my circa-2000 Denso mobile phone from Sprint is the addition of some very computer/laptop-like functions: e-mail, Web browsing, music playing and other applications. So other than screen size I was wondering what is the difference between the iPad and either my iPhone or my MacBook Pro.

In reading the Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines for the iPad I found a distinction I didn’t expect. Apple tells me the iPad is NOT a computer:

Although iPad applications can allow people to create and manipulate files, this does not mean that people should have a sense of the file system on iPad… On iPad, there is no application analogous to the Mac OS X Finder, and people should not be asked to interact with files as they do on a computer.

But that left me wondering what defines a computer — at least to Apple’s user interface designers. Is it the exposure of a file system? As more and more devices share information over the Internet, the dividing line between devices that are computers and those that are not will get harder to draw.

The next generation e-mail using, Web-browsing mobile phones will be so ubiquitous that it will be silly to discuss smart phones — every phone will be smart. But that still leaves a category to be defined. Will the iPad be an example of a tablet — an internet-enabled device larger than a phone, but without a keyboard? A tablet computer? Or despite Apple’s guidelines just a computer in the shape of tablet?