How the Apple iPad could be useful to the professional photographer

The idea of a tablet computer has interested me for a few years now. But I have always felt that up until this point they were computers with a touch screens.  The tablet functionality always seemed secondary on all these past attempts.  I was excited to see what apple would come up with because I have been using the iPod Touch and a tablet computer for the past few years.  While I feel apple has not lived up to expectations on creating the revilutionary device that would end world hunger, I feel with a few good app developers this could become a very useful tool to the professional photographer.

I have a few Ideas on how this may be accomplished.

1. Camera tether without other computer: On the IPhone there is already an app call DSLR Remote that allows you to tether your camera to your computer and control your camera. If you could do the same thing without the computer I would be a very happy man.  In conjunction with the camera connection kit that you can buy for the iPad this might be possible.

2. Rethink the sourcebook: I feel that the source book could be reimagened by taking the best of printed and web versions and make a kind of hybrid sourcebook.  It could be more easily updated like the website and have a few interactive features while having a page layout that allows better viewing of the images.

3. Photoshop compainion program:  Many photoshop user use two monitors.  It's a nice pace to put tool pallets and see a full view of the image while working at 100 percent.  The iPad could easily fill these functions and more.  It could also be a small wacom like monitor in witch you could do simple masking and dodging and burning.  

4. On the go image manipulation and publishing:  There are a whole slew of iPhone apps that very easily let you do simple image alterations and publish them to sites like twitter, facebook or blogs from the small device.  This could be taken to the next level.  I'm not saying that we put the desktop version of photoshop on this thing, but the possibilities that this device could facilitate interesting imaging apps are exiting.

5. Distribute a well designed paperless portfolio book:  Websites have greatly changed the landscape on how people view portfolios.  But websites have there limitations, that is why I still have a rather expensive printed portfolio.  With this It may be possible to make something that builds on the experience of both the interactivity and ease of updating of web and the beauty of a printed book.  And to be able to distribute this through ether the app store or the new ibooks store would make it easy to get it into the hands of your clients.

6. Save the publishing industry from the world of web design: Websites have lots of advantages, but they are mostly ugly and don't work well for articles of a decent length.  Also the size of images that go with the articles make me sad.  This could be changed by opening up the layout possibilities to fix these two problems.