Imagining the iPad café
You grab your iPad off of the coffee table, saunter down to your local café and order a coffee (or a pot of tea, if you're cultured). Lounging on the leather couch (and a little stoked that you were able to get a spot because everybody always goes for the couches, always), you fire up the iBooks app and do some light reading.
The bing indicating new e-mail (not a Microsoft search engine) interrupts your daze, and you switch over to the Mail app. A message from a coworker alerts you that he needs your input on a report.
Acknowledging that typing on a screen is stupidly inefficient, you get up from the couch, survey the room and sit down at a table. On it is an iPad Keyboard Dock.
Viola. Your 1.5-pound, ultra-portable tablet thing is now a computer, sort of.
Such a scenario can't be far off. When café owners recognized that they could keep laptop-toting stiffs around longer and (hopefully) buying more caffeine injections by offering easily-accessible power outlets, many went to the lengths of outfitting coffee bars with as many plugs as the power grid would allow.
If the iPad takes off in the way some are predicting — with an estimated quarter-million pre-orders clocked as of a week before its slated launch (more than the number of Nexus One phones believed to be sold in two months), it's looking pretty likely — docking stations could be the smart move for enterprising café owners.
Why not bring a laptop in this (and every) scenario? A MacBook Pro can weigh three to four times more than an iPad. In instances when I don't plan on doing any heavy writing, I could certainly envision opting for the tablet.
But having the piece of mind that my coffee shop offers a keyboard in the event that some work needs to be tended to is worth an extra buck per cup.
Photo: ljcybergal
