Many people will have heard about the release of the Apple iPad this week, it’s a new tablet device that looks a lot like an oversize iPhone in terms of design but has a different set of uses. While Steve Jobs touted many of the entertainment aspects of the device during his keynote, there are some ways in which the iPad could be used for productivity and getting work and study done for school.

First of all, one of the major features being touted for the iPad is the iBook application and store. Apple has established relationships with five major publishers and they will make fiction books available to the iBook application costing between $12.99 - $14.99. The iBook application will allow you to see books on your virtual shelf, page through books by touching the screen as if you were flicking the page, and increase/decrease the font size of text. The backlight will make reading at night easy to do, and the IPS screen the iPad comes with will give fantastic viewing angles. The one downside is that other e-reader devices such as the Amazon Kindle use a technology called e-ink that makes it easy on the eyes reading a screen, much like reading a book, but with the iPad it will be just like reading a computer screen which can strain the eyes.

The real question for those in academics is whether Apple and publishers they’re working with will offer textbooks for the iBook format. Carrying several textbooks on the 1.5lb Apple iPad could be very compelling, the 9.6-inch IPS screen with touch capability could make for an interesting experience, one can imagine the ability to touch and highlight text or scratch notes with your finger. And since the iPad supports color and video, embedded illustrations and video media could really enhance a textbook. So far there has been no indication that textbook publishers will be doing anything in regards to distributing their books to the iBook store, but we’ll find out more in the coming weeks on that front.

Although you won’t be able to use productivity applications such as Microsoft Office on the Apple iPad, Apple has ported their popular iWork set of productivity apps to the iPad. This means you can use the Keynote, Pages and Numbers applications to make presentations, word processing documents and spreadsheets. Apple has adjusted the software so that you can simply touch words and images to perform tasks, make the applications much more touch friendly. While you wouldn’t want to write a thesis on the iPad using Pages, you at least have the ability to take some notes or edit an existing document created on a MacBook computer.

Of course we can’t ignore the fact that the web itself is used a ton to do research and knowledge gathering, and the iPad will be a master at putting the Internet right in your hands. You can take the iPad with you in a bag and pull it out and start catching up with any website you read online for study purposes. In addition, since so much learning and collaboration software is web based these days, you can access all these sites on the iPad and do work and study on the go.

There is no doubt that education software publishers might start using the iPad as a platform for developing education applications and using the App store to distribute these applications. It will be interesting to see if any University embraces the iPad as a device for students to use for education purposes as some have used the Apple iPod as a means for distributing education content using Podcasts.

The Apple iPad Wi-Fi edition will be available in 60-days starting at $499.99 for the 16GB edition, while a cellular based wireless edition will be available in 90-days for $629 with $30/month all you can use data plan from AT&T.