The iPad, a product designed by Apple that comes on the market in China next month, is undeniably cool. But will the much-touted tablet device be a sensible choice for consumers?

It will certainly appeal to those who want to be techno-chic. The iPad features a 9.7-inch touch-screen, new iBook service and functions from e-book reading and video watching to gaming. The price starts at US$499, similar to Amazon's Kindle DX, a 9.7-inch e-book reader with a more shabby black and white screen.

"We want to kick off 2010 with a truly revolutionary and magical product," Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive, said during a conference to promote the new product last month.

Where design innovation is concerned, the iPad is no trend-setter, compared with Apple's earlier iPod, iPhone and Macbook Air. It resembles a bigger iPhone with a larger screen.

Besides offering an improved multimedia experience, iPad features a new application called iBooks. It allows users to both read e-books on the device and, importantly, to purchase new books and download them directly to the iPad.

Apple hopes to kick-start the market for e-books with its iPad and iBooks service, and replicate its success with the iPod and iTunes.

"IBooks store is to books what iTunes is to music," said Adam Leach, principal analyst of Ovum, a United Kingdom-based IT consulting firm.

This puts the iPad in direct competition with other e-book readers, most notably Amazon's Kindle. The revenue-generating capacity of the e-book market looks significant, with early estimates for the Kindle 2 suggesting that the device had earned over US$100 million in little more than two months after its launch in February last year, Leach said in a note.

The iPad's advantage over the similarly priced Kindle DX is that it provides a host of multimedia functions as well as e-book reading. For example, it supports playing embedded video inside a newspaper article, which was demonstrated by New York Times during the iPad conference.

"We think we've captured the essence of reading the newspaper," said Jobs.

Never underestimate the formidable technical and marketing prowess of Apple, which operates iTunes Store, the world's most successful online multimedia content and application store.