Apple iPad

The Apple iPad is the SmallBizWindows Consumer Product of the Year.

I’ll wait while most of you recover.

Yes, pick yourselves or your jaws off the floor, and close your agape mouths.

Moreover, I haven’t lost my senses, so those of you reaching for their phones in order to kindly call for an ambulance to take me to any sanatorium for a speedy recovery, please refrain from doing so, and read this.

The iPad really is our Consumer Product of the Year 2010.

When the editorial staff here at SmallBizWindows sat down to define our specs for the CPotY, we certainly didn’t have ANY Apple product in mind. However, when the scope was set, the iPad came away a winner. For this category, we wanted

• A product that was clearly revolutionary, and either redefined or created a new category,
• A product that was racing to iconic or legendary status,
• A product universally acknowledged – by consumers, not the digerati – as a ‘must-have’,
• A product that was in the process of moving beyond consumer use into the enterprise, as the utility of the product was very evident, and
• A product with excellent sales.

That last requirement was added by Yours Truly, as I didn’t want us to crown the IT equivalent of the Monica. I wanted a product that was not only well regarded, but one that consumers had voted for with their checkbooks.

Only two products fit this list: the Apple iPad, and Microsoft Kinect for Xbox 360. Windows Phone 7 was dropped because there was both an absence of accurate sales data from Microsoft, and the ‘whisper’ numbers of handsets sold to customers were unreliable.

After that, criterion 5 applied, and the iPad won.

There is so much that can be said for the iPad that I needn’t regurgitate them here. Suffice it to say that my predictions for iPad came through, and that it is slowly moving from a content-consumption device to a content-creation mode. (While some people are able to create content on the iPad today, the average user cannot.)

In a strange twist of fate, I won an iPad 3G from Fusion IO at the 2010 HP Technology Forum in Las Vegas, Nevada, where I was given my device by Apple co-founder and Übergeek, Steve Wozniak.

How apropos that if I was to use an Apple product, it would be given to me by a co-founder?