Last week's Apple event has been widely reported in detail, but with a minimum of real analysis on the importance of the why, the how and the what being communicated.  For me there were three significant aspects:

• Apple improving their leading position in the tablet business by making the leading product even better, as well as opening up a new sub segment of the market to flank the low end competition.
• The whole event demonstrating that design is still at the heart of the Apple vision.
• Showing there is life after Steve Jobs - the vision, culture and team he put in place are carrying the torch and keeping up the pace.  (I wish I'd bought shares around about the time the iPod was first announced or before!)

Plenty of reporters and commentators presented most of the facts and the numbers corectly, misunderstood the pricing of the new iPad Mini thinking it too high, and then made the mistake of missing the .9 after the 7 in the size of its screen.  So much technlogy reporting these days seems repetitive, regurgitating the technical specifications and processor chip models in the press release with little analysis and thought of what the technology ...

The first thing I've got to say is the title of this post was supplied in a tweet from Alan Patrick (@freecloud), but it perfectly encapsulates the controversy going on in the geek world around the new Apple tablet device announced on Wednesday.  Is it going to be as successful and "game changing" like the iPod and iTunes, or a flawed failure like the Apple Newton?  I believe it will be very successful as an e-book reader, for news consumption and Internet access, but also in bringing a whole new audience of technologically challenged people for whom a laptop or a netbook are just too complicated to own and carry around.  

It was fascinating to hear how Steve Jobs was positioning both Apple as a manufacturer of mobile devices larger than Sony, Samsung and Nokia in that context, and then the iPad as a new category of product in opposition to the netbook.  It's well worth listening to the keynote, and watching the slick demonstrations.  For me iPad follows two important paths.  The first is simple user experience and the second is Darwinian divergence in product categories.  

On the first path, the iPad uses the iPhone operating system ...