There has certainly been a lot of hoopla over Apple’s launch of the iPad.  Reports are they sold 300,000 of them in the first day, including those that were pre-ordered, bought in Apple stores, or sold to retailers such as Best Buy.  At a local Apple event yesterday, Apple personnel said that number had now climbed to 450,000.  Pretty impressive for a device that starts at $499 for the entry model.

I teased a couple of my friends who are huge Apple fans that it was a giant iPhone.  In fact, one of the folks I work with said when he arrived at home last night with a new iPad, his young son jumped up and down and said “It’s a giant iPhone, yay!”  But all kidding aside, I was really interested in what new niche this product might carve for itself. After all, it is an Apple product, and they have an almost fanatical following. And let’s not forget, they didn’t get that following by accident. They typically produce good products, and they do a great job marketing them.

As a few of us were playing with the new device (I could use a more sophisticated term such as “experimenting”, but let’s face it, we were “playing”), a friend of mine dropped by.  He has been developing business applications for the iPhone for some time now, and has had some success with those.  Since the announcement of the iPad, he has been working on an idea to build a more sophisticated business application for the iPad.   He dropped in to show me what he already had working.

What he showed me was really impressive. Part of that is because he’s a pretty talented guy. His iPhone apps are pretty slick as well.  But a big part of what caught my attention was what types of applications were now possible with a mobile device.  I had one of those “Aha” moments. I realized just how much of a groundbreaking platform the iPad could be serving as a platform for select business applications. It won’t be easy getting there though.

Here’s the deal. The iPad has a much larger screen than a smartphone, while still being very portable. You don’t have to wag anything along with it for it to be useful. And, you have network access. Yes I know about the WiFi problems, but Apple will fix that. The larger form factor makes it possible to put much more information on the screen at a given time, so the applications can tend to be much more sophisticated. Cool, right? Yep.

It doesn’t come without issues though. The onscreen keyboard is not something anybody will want to do much typing on. Fine, that’s a user interface design issue, right?  Right. Mobile developers tackle those issues every day.  Here’s another one for you though. Once the developer begins to put more information on the screen, the application itself tends to get more capable. It grows in scope…so much so, that it approaches the scope of more traditional business apps. I believe this means many iPad business applications will not be residing completely on the iPad itself. They will demand a server component, and likely even a component that will be accessed by more traditional computers with physical keyboards and mice.

So what does all this mean? I believe it means that traditional application developers will begin to migrate into the mobile market more quickly, at least for this form factor. That means they will need to learn all those user interface, and communication rules that mobile developers already know. It also means that strictly mobile developers will have to enlarge their thinking to incorporate non-mobile aspects of these more sophisticated applications.

Smartphones and applications on them aren’t going away. In fact, comScore predicts there will be about 65 million smartphones shipped in 2010 for North America alone. Laptops and desktop computers aren’t going away either.  What most “experts” expect to happen is that the iPad will create a new market segment. We all know that Apple is fully expecting that. No surprises on any of those points. What did surprise me, however, is I caught a glimpse of how powerful this new form factor could be for the business environment right now.