If you pay any attention at all to the tech press, you’re probably sick to death of the iPad, Apple’s announced tablet device. I’m posting about it anyway, because there are two things that haven’t been discussed enough, which I think deserve a mention.

One: this isn’t a device for the tech community. I think Rafe Colburn hits it on the head:

It’s just an iPod Touch with a big screen, but that’s all that many people need from a computer. You can use it to surf the Web, read email, listen to music, watch video, or compose documents. That’s the personal computer use case for many people. And I think a lot of people are going to buy them.

He goes on to discuss the locked-down nature of the device, which I agree is a setback that may have a profound impact on the consumer computing industry. (On the other hand, as Yehuda Katz argues, this is a major win for standards-based web applications.)

Two: for me, the big news wasn’t the iPad at all. It was iBooks: Apple’s new iTunes-like store for ebooks. You may remember that iTunes pretty much revolutionized how we buy music, and this is the same; the books are stored in the open ePub standard, so they’ll play with other ereaders, and the experience is seamless. (You almost certainly won’t need an iPad to buy from iBooks.)

Mashable notes that some big players are on board:

iBooks is backed by big-time launch partners Penguin, Simon and Schuster, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Hachette, all publishing powerhouses in their own rights.

You can think about the iPad as a kind of $499 catwalk model, that other devices will slowly emulate over the next couple of years. But iBooks? That’s a store that anyone will be able to use right away, which just might change the publishing industry forever.

Photo by kennymatic, released under a Creative Commons license.

TI sees projectors as popular as cell cameras.

And they may well be right. The cellphone really is turning into the ‘portable multimedia computer’ that Nokia always talks about: an Internet connected device that allows you to download and play content, as well as record voice, video, photographs and documents and send them back into the cloud.

I think Apple and Google both see this; Microsoft seems to be a step or two behind, insisting on marrying its mobile operating system to its legacy Windows platform. I’m sure they’ll wake up eventually.