Wired Magazine on an iPad

For all the naysayers who are calling the iPad nothing but a big iPod Touch, here is a great demonstration of what’s just a few months away.  Imagine being able to interact with your textbooks and other books in this way.  Incredible!

Something tells me this is only the tip of the iceberg.  As one of the people mentions in the video, this may be as large of a change for journalism as the transition from radio to TV.  This type of technology is likely to have huge ramifications for education – not just textbooks but with new forms of educational delivery.

Of course, there may be some technical difficulties to surmount before this becomes perfected:

The catch, of course, is that while Wired Reader can be packaged into its own Air runtime app to load on the iPad, Apple doesn't have to allow it (for reasons of security, stability or, well, whatever grumpy reasoning Apple comes up with). Also, the demo you see here is seamlessly smooth, and this fluidity is a huge flavor component to this visual candy. Whether or not the content will be so jitter-less on either the iPad or any stock Android tablet is still an unknown (especially as some iPad animations tended to stutter during our hands on, without any Air go-between).

But these challenges should be overcome very soon.  (Think of the performance increases in the iPhone between the first generation and the 3GS.)

There are bound to be many more tremendously innovative apps such as this that no one has even dreamed of yet.  (Including the totally silly.)  Bring them on!