You know that little portable DVD player you have for the car. The same one that sits on the back of the seat of that jet you flew on? The same one you use at home to keep the kids quiet in their bedroom when you have guests over?

Well it’s dead.

And its killer isn’t a cheaper version. It’s more expensive. It’s the iPad.

One of the great capabilites Apple have managed to develop over such a long period is not only the ability to develop breakthrough technology, but an uncanny ability to pull existing technology together in breakthrough packages. The iPod, iPhone and now the iPad do this brilliantly. And in doing so they put to the sword many of the single use products that currently exist.

Products like this, and indeed the strategies responsible for them, are specifically designed to make the product extraordinarily sticky to multiple market segments by simultaneously delivering a core benefit to that segment for free. By doing so they disrupt the players who were currently charging for that benefit.

Hence products like the iPod and iPhone are not simply single category killers but multiple category killers. Witness the impact of maps on mobile phones and their impact on the prices of GPS devices. Bloodshed.

The iPad is already shapping up to be a similar play by Apple as its predecessors. What we expect to happen is that the iPad will have a whole number of uses that no one could have intialy expected.

And lo and behold it’s happening already!

JetStar will later in June begin trialling iPad rentals on some of their domestic flights for AUD$10.

The test of a great product isn’t the intended use its designer had for it, but the myriad of unintended uses customers find for it after its launched. As F.W Johnson is reported to have said, “every solution changes the problem”. The fascinating thing to watch will be the myriad of problems that suddenly an iPad seems to solve. Stay tuned.