With all due respect to Steve Jobs, he chose the wrong name for Apple's new iPad. A far better name would be iWonder. As in, it certainly is a consumer-tech wonder. And also as in, I wonder if the content providers who may determine its success are prepared to take full advantage of it?

The half hour or so I spent playing with the iPad at its San Francisco unveiling last week was much too short a time to evaluate it authoritatively. What I can say is that it's fast, beautiful and loaded with potential.

The half-inch-thin iPad looks something like an iPod Touch on steroids. While it uses the iPhone/iPod Touch operating system ? meaning it runs just about all the 140,000 or so applications already written for those pocket-sized devices ? you can sense a little Mac DNA as well in the machined aluminum back. It feels solid and substantial in your hand ? and also, at about a pound and a half, is considerably heavier than a typical e-book reader, one of its core functions.

Indeed, the iPad is about consumption of media in all its forms, from storing and viewing your photos to watching high-definition movies on the beautiful 9.7-inch touch screen.

I was struck by its speed and responsiveness. In the photo application, for instance, I could race through hundreds of photos in a blur. Apps originally written for the iPhone, such as Electronic Arts' car-racing game Need for Speed Shift, looked terrific when expanded to fit the iPad screen.

They may look better still once developers begin writing specifically to the new dimensions and the capabilities of the custom Apple-designed chip that powers the unit.

While Apple is hardly known for the value pricing of its products, the iPad may be the exception. It will be available in six models, with the least expensive ? including 16GB of flash-memory storage and Wi-Fi connectivity ? starting at just $499 (€360). It and two other wi-fi models with more memory go on sale in March.

At those prices, and if the iPad also fulfills Jobs' battery-life promises ? 10 hours of heavy-duty use, and even longer for lower-impact functions such as listening to music ? Apple will have delivered a true achievement. Then the question will be whether the publishing industry, which up to now hasn't been known for forward-thinking, will do the same.

Will book publishers, for example, get to work producing added-value interactive versions that include author interviews and DVD-style extras to take advantage of the iPad's multimedia capabilities? Or will they be content to use Apple's new iBooks store to sell the same plain-vanilla e-books they currently produce, in hopes of simply lessening their dependence on Amazon.com?

To be truly "revolutionary", which was the word Jobs used to describe it, the iPad needs content as cool as it is.

Rich Jaroslovsky is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.