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When Steve Jobs launched the iPad yesterday, he made a compelling case for a device to fill the gap between a smartphone and a PC/Mac. In his words, “If there’s gonna be a third category, it has to be better at these tasks — otherwise it has no reason for being.” Which tasks?

• Browsing
• Email
• Photos
• Video
• Music
• Games
• eBooks

So, I thought it might be interesting to look at each of these things and see whether it is better at these key tasks than any of the alternatives.

Browsing
I think browsing the Internet on the iPad would be a nice experience. The screen size and touch interface combined with the portability of the device would seem to offer a better experience than a smartphone, netbook or PC/Mac. However, at the moment there is no Flash player on the iPad, and given that much of the video streaming done on the Internet now runs through Flash, I would see this as a huge fault.

Verdict: better than a smartphone, but simply cannot compete with a PC/Mac. Probably a better browsing experience with that screen than a netbook, but at least my netbook has the Flash player, not to mention a choice of browsers. I don’t believe anyone could say the iPad is better at browsing.

Email
Apple have vastly improved the iPhone email interface for the iPad, but the iPad is not a phone. Surely they should have used Mac Mail as the starting point? By virtue of the bigger screen, the iPad will be more pleasant to use than a smartphone, but given the superior portability of a phone and the cheaper cost of connectivity, it doesn’t really win out in the mobile email stakes. And of course, it can’t match a standard OS for email power and choice of email clients.

Verdict: what’s better? Nothing that I can see. Smartphones are better for mobile email, netbooks and PC/Macs are better at general email. Another defeat for iPad I’m afraid.

Photos
I’m just confused by this. I could see a use for the iPad as a way to share and enjoy photos with family and friends, but its lack of standard USB connectivity ruins this. You can’t just plug your digital camera into your iPad (not without the special adapter/connector, which will be a cost extra anyway), nor can you copy photos onto a memory stick or external hard disk. Presumably you will be reduced to copying all those 10MP photos in your collection via the incredibly slow Bluetooth, or by WiFi, assuming you have an access point nearby.

There’s no camera in the iPad, and it’s not like you would want to actually take photos with a device of this size anyway. Many smartphones on the other hand, do have cameras, and some of them are very good. My Palm Pre has an acceptable camera, with a flash, and is able to upload directly to Facebook, which is actually where I share photos with my friends and family.

Verdict: better than a smartphone or netbook for browsing photos, but much more difficult to get the photos on the device in the first place. Can’t match a PC/Mac for this at all.

Video
This I really don’t understand. The screen is 1024 x 768 resolution, or 4:3 in aspect ratio terms, so there’s no widescreen and given that most video produced now is widescreen, that means you will be chopping part of the video off to make it fit, or you will be forced to watch video in a strip across the middle of the screen. Most smartphones are widescreen, and so is pretty much every netbook or PC/Mac you can buy.

The lack of Flash player means that there’s no chance of watching online TV with BBC iPlayer or other services, and that’s just a huge flaw. And that lack of USB also means no DVD drive either.

Verdict: smartphones may be small but they are at least widescreen. Netbooks have the Flash player and can play DVDs with external drives. Your PC/Mac can do all of these things much better. So where does that leave iPad?

Music
Music? Really? Who is going to want a portable music player with a 9.7″ screen? It could be useful, plugged into an amp whilst streaming music from your main iTunes collection, but on its own the iPad does not look like a revolutionary music device, nor can it do anything better than any other devices.

Perhaps Apple are referring to music production, but given they have supplied no apps for this, I think I’ll stick to Garageband and Logic on my more powerful and usable Macs.

Verdict: iPad does nothing better than anything else.

Games
Again, I don’t get it. Touchscreen games are all well and good on an iPhone or iPod touch, but on a larger device it is a nonsense interface. Plus, the graphics power is hardly going to be blowing anyone away. For the price of a decent iPad you can have a reasonable PC games rig, or you could have a netbook and a games console.

Verdict: smartphones are better for mobile games, and PC/Mac is better for proper games. The iPad probably beats a netbook here, although mine does run Quake3 at perfectly acceptable speeds. I remain entirely unconvinced.

eBooks
And here we get to the core of the issue. If Apple had launched the iPad as the iReader, I think everyone would be happy. Whether or not its screen works as well as the Kindle’s e-ink screen for reading books, remains to be seen. But given the closeness of the pricing on the various reader devices, the iPad makes a lot of sense: pay a little more, get a lot more. Personally, I’d rather sit and read a well thumbed paperback.

Verdict: the iPad’s true reason for being.

Should you buy an iPad?
If you are in the market for an e-reader, then the iPad has to be worthy of consideration. If not, then I don’t believe iPad will do anything for you other than giving you a short period of popularity whilst all your friends and colleagues come to stroke it and dribble on it. I guess if you have money to burn and you want to buy into Apple’s sexily packaged gadget du jour, then go for it.

If you do buy it, just remember that Apple will eventually address all the flaws, just as they did with iPhone, and then in short order they will bring out a better specced, more powerful and cheaper second version, leaving you with an obsolete but attractive door stop.

Apple has always treated its early adopters with an attitude bordering on contempt, yet the fanboys keep coming back for more, always failing to realise Apple couldn’t give a crap about them - they are, and always have been, a corporation interested only in the bottom line, and a bunch of early adopters buying what is essentially a beta version are simply helping to pay for the research and development of the final version, and that is very good for the bottom line.