“large, thin iPhone, without cell service”
“pointed the grow ray at the iphone.”
“over sized itouch”
“on the inside is an itouch”

Yep, that’s all it is, a great big FAST iPhone…But that’s saying a lot. In the case of the iPhone/iPad, growing the screen enough that you could fit a handful of fingers, a whole PC screen, an HD movie, a nice sized keyboard and 30 lines of text, etc. made a qualitative difference.

I’ll admit to bias as one of the Citrix team that put together the iPad receiver, but I assure you that the iPad is the BEST mobile thin client we’ve ever worked on. When the mobile data (cell radio equipped) iPads hit the market later this month, Citrix enterprise users will be slurping them up by the thousands to provide always-on connections to their server farms.

It’s also the BEST portable digital sketchpad ever seen, the nicest ebook reader I’ve ever used, the best mobile web client yet, the handiest GotoMeeting client, and the best XP/Vista/Win7 touchpad on the planet (when connected to Citrix servers). GoToMyPC and various VNC clients won’t be far behind, finally delivering the ubiquitous computing that some of us have been waiting for since the days of GEnie and The Source.

There’s already thousands of useful apps; apps that take advantage of the iPad’s brilliant GUI, flawless multitouch, excellent accelerometers, and fast wifi.

If you want a lightweight mobile thin client with excellent battery life and display, to connect to your corporate Windows apps and desktops. (or your unix/linux apps and desktops) then look at the iPad.

If you want a web and email tool to give grandma, you can’t do better than this, it works just like an iPhone, but bigger and faster.

All it is is a great big iPhone…But that’s exactly what we need for ubiquitous computing.