When the iPad was announced this week my first thought was, “They’ve come out with a giant iPhone!”  (Okay, so technically it’s more akin to a giant iPod Touch, but as an iPhone user, this is where my mind goes.)  I was skeptical about its potential usefulness.  It’s confined to iPhone-like applications; everything has to come from the App Store.  It won’t run a JDK, and isn’t even as useful to me as a netbook.

I was guilty of thinking inside the box.  The old, stale, PC box.

Thankfully Steve Jobs doesn’t suffer from such confinement.  He’s come up with a device which will, in typical Apple-product style, find uses far beyond what our old machinery was capable of.  In his classic book “Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance,”  Robert Pirsig says that the ancient Greeks, “saw the future as something that came upon them from behind their backs, with the past receding away before their eyes.” If we could turn around now and stare directly into the future, I think we’d see iPads galore in the hands of Wall Streeters, many of whom are extremely busy but need a way to track metrics of all kinds throughout the day.  Applications at present are filled to the brim with alerting capabilities such as email, IM, SMS, and chimes, and these are the best we can do given the current infrastructure; Apple has just handed the users of these apps a whole new way to stay connected.

The iPad offers both wireless and 3G connectivity.  Trading systems are generally locked down tightly, but why couldn’t secure wireless access points be added which would admit an iPad-carrying risk manager to the network?  No longer must (s)he rely on the buzz of a BlackBerry to find out that daily trading limits have been violated.  Now there’s a beautiful 10 inch pad right on the conference table which displays those limits and the proximity to them in real time.

Likewise the trader.  There are so many custom “pads” out there on trading floors already — why not something that’s available off the shelf and that’s far more capable than today’s devices?

Retail trading is another area where the iPad could find a ready-made market.  Many brokerages have written custom iPhone apps or have websites which are designed for easy access from a mobile platform (Fidelity, Schwab, TD Ameritrade, Interactive Brokers all come to mind).  The iPad offers the possibility of a rich touchscreen-based GUI which could enhance the experience for active traders enormously.

I’ve touched on but a few of the possibilites. (This is, after all, just a reply to an article and not an article itself.)  I’ve no doubt that Lab49 will be out at the cutting edge of iPad development as it is with many other disruptive technologies.

Let the fun begin!