That includes the iPad as well as the iPod Touch. Take Control Books, edited by Mac veteran Adam Engst, has a new PDF book title out to maximize your use of Mail while mobile. Take Control of Mail on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. Written and edited by Joe Kissell and Dan Frakes, the 96-page book promises to make Mail more useful on these devices.

This new ebook takes a practical look at using the Mail app on an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. It explains various email account options, helps you develop a real-world mobile email strategy that integrates with your Mac, explains the mechanics of sending and receiving mobile email, and provides essential troubleshooting advice.

Mail is one of the most useful things on the iPad, in part because you can create something in it — an aspect of the iPad that’s still gaining credibility. Even over a WiFi link, it’s become a ready tool in my business belt. Take Control has other Mail training aids as well, if your exposure to Mail is limited to your desktop.

We just got a free update to the Take Control of Apple Mail in Snow Leopard ebook, which covers plenty of nuances but is written for the first-time user of Mail. That’s been me, until recently, because I’m making a transition away from Eudora. (Odd behavior in Eudora under Snow Leopard. Beware.)

Engst’s group even has a special anti-spam edition of a book for Mail. These three titles are available in various bundles at a 30 percent discount. You can even download them for reading (using the EPUB versions) on your iPad.

In the vacuum of the month before the doors opened, nobody could tell how spry the old guy’s step was going to be yesterday. The conference organizers invited the right people, to be sure. They got an Emmy winner in David Pogue to kick off the opening day with a show so complete it even included a play about Steve Jobs, written as a parody of It’s a Wonderful Life. They got Levar Burton to play Steve Jobs, so the actor who created Geordi La Forge on Star Trek could swap adulation with Pogue. “I can’t believe I get to meet you,” they each said.

But it’s one thing to put on a good one-act and another to fill the seats. A few hundred yards away from the play, the bodies were thick in the center of a bustling Macworld 2010 Expo floor. “Steve Jobs isn’t here,” Pogue said to start his keynote. But the Apple faithful were, and probably will be even more by tomorrow, the first weekend day in decades for this conference.

You had to be patient, in the face of the Cool New Stuff all around, to squeeze through some aisles and into some sessions. Like Burton, though, people seemed to know that this meeting about the Mac has roots, deep enough to weather the chill Apple showed to the show.

Burton came into the public’s eye the year before the Mac was born, the Reading Rainbow host who’s now in his 50s and producing. Pogue is 46, and neither fellow looked anything but genuine in his child-like ardor for Apple’s solutions. Out on the expo floor there were plenty more less famous acolytes and experts to testify to a shinier future, with evidence of their creations on display.

Macworld is so much bigger than just the Mac these days, and what’s been sloughed off of this event isn’t being missed. For every absent Adobe booth there was an expanded Crash Plan exhibit, where the back up company showed a product range wide enough to be free for The People or priced to help corporations protect untold acres of data. Crash Plan was giving out $60 licenses to everybody who visited its booth. Adobe might have been here before, but I never walked away from their booth holding a free tool that could keep my creations alive.

If I ran a company and wanted to save money on my utilities, I would look into the asset management software from Absolute Software. Tucked away into the Enterprise Desktop Alliance booth, the company showed the sort of product you would expect for corporate servers, tracking the use of Macs on a network to show when they could be put to sleep to reduce power consumption. The software scales from a handful of Macs to thousands, in one office or across an organization’s continental network.

The products sold through Dr. Bott include Blue Microphone’s Mikey, emerging in a new model tuned up to grab meeting notes as well as close-up note dictation. It swivels toward the subject of your video you’re taking with the iPhone. It’s got a line-in port to use for phone recording and three “volume” settings on the gadget that plugs into an iPhone or iPod Touch, new gain settings to help you get the sound onto a file headed for your Mac. Once it’s there, the new Scribe software from MacSpeech will help push those spoken words into text. The software was so new to production release that they were burning DVDs at the back of the booth to tuck into boxes. But it was also being sold at about a 40 percent discount.

That sums up the draw of Macworld, for the faithful who’ve come here for years. Something new, unveiled in the sparkle of a sea of the excited, sold at a steep deal and explained in a way the Web can never match. It was enough of a valentine to why we love Apple’s products to bring a tear to this old guy’s eye. Of course, it helped that the moment was echoing It’s a Wonderful Life‘s finale, when “Steve Jobs” learns that there wouldn’t have been the Web, or Wired Magazine, or popular computers, or Pixar, if he hadn’t invented the Mac.

And it helped if you were old enough to know and love the movie as well as the long haul away from that darkest year of 1998, as Pogue’s play pointed out, when Apple lost $1.7 billion and the last non-Jobs CEO was leading the Mac over a cliff. If a Mac’s life could imitate art, the ardor of the audience and attendees here showed a lively pulse for the products of tomorrow, showed today.

It still looks to us like a good tool for a small or home office business. Apple wants us to believe this, or it wouldn’t have spent so much time showing off its Excel echo (Numbers) or PowerPoint knock off (Keynote) facets from the iWork suite.

In practice the iPad will have to deliver real-world results. What doesn’t look sexy and necessary onstage alongside Steve Jobs? (I know, CEO Paul Otellini of Intel, even if you put him in a clean suit at the 2006 Macworld.)

The complaints about a lack of phone ability are off base, though. You’d never put this thing to your ear, but if you use a laptop to Skype-call today, the iPad will permit you to do this. Permit, I say, because yesterday Apple dropped its restrictions so apps can use Voice Over IP, the engine that enables Skype, over 3G networks. Skype already runs on the iPhone.

But Skype illustrates one of the biggest questions about the iPad. The new device is supposed to be a step up from a smartphone, but not so smart as Apple’s laptops. Using Skype on a laptop enables an add-on like eCamm’s note-taker Voice Recorder. Since the iPad runs only one app at a time, how will applications like Voice Recorder and Skype integrate? Never mind multitasking, I just want helper applications. And how do we get our documents onto and off this thing? Please don’t tell me that iTunes is in charge of synchronizing that, too.

On the other hand, Apple’s Mac applications are changed on iPad. Most for the better, from first-hand-user reports out today. Mail is a smoother interface. iCal a better calendar than on the Mac. And Numbers, and Pages and Keynote? Now $9.99 each. They cost $79 retail (for all three) in the Mac version

The iPad won’t displace the Kindle mojo at Amazon. But you’ll never get anybody to call a Kindle a business tool, even with its not-widely-discussed 3G capability to let you browse the Web via Sprint, a free service. The trouble is the Kindle uses a crude, experimental, text-mostly interface. And that’s the heart of the Apple difference: how it feels. Literally, in this case, since touching the iPad is almost the only way to use it.

I’ve got a friend who dreamed of the ability to use iPad as a phone if you’re paying for the 3G service. Well, 1. The iPad-as-phone is not a great business policy to protect the juggernaut of iPhone sales, and 2. The iPad is telephony-capable already, via iCall (VOIP) or Skype.

Nothing’s perfect. A vendor’s business plan always has more sway over success than technology advances. Apple is calculating enough to let three product lines rise at the same time. It practices a prickly business mantra of crippling each of its devices with some key feature missing — like a phone, or a video camera, or Flash replay, or a still camera, or 3G. Currently it sells nothing that has all of these features in one product.

What comes next is the actual iPad rollout experiences and the look toward the promised HP Slate, if a tablet is on your list of business tools. HP sure has a fresh opportunity to release such a magic product, with multitasking, head-turning performance and 140,000 apps ready on Day One, plus heavy TV ad rotation to sell it to the consumers. Let’s give HP the Apple dream-up treatment for the time remaining until the Slate shows up. Or are we jaded enough to set our expectations lower? Aw, why be cynical?

We already have a good list of what the iPad lacks — the Slate needs to deliver most of it, right? Let’s just be sure to insist the Slate’s got things the iPad has at debut, like 10 hour battery life, a custom-built chip by the vendor (drat, no more PA-RISC built by HP) to optimize speed and contain costs, display technology built for sharing (IPS), and a 22-ounce total weight. Don’t forget about the revenue streams from music, movies and book content, too. I mean, where the device maker takes 30 cents of every dollar to defray the development and advertising expense of the Slate.

I’d also like to see HP open up, oh, 284 high-profile retail stores worldwide to shape the customer’s initial experience. Perhaps the Best Buy-level of retail clerk would not be the best baseline to populate these HP stores. Try to get 50 million visitors through those 284 doors over the year, okay? Because you’re establishing a breakthrough product nobody’s ever seen.

This isn’t a Mac, but it’s more than a big Touch. (I own one of those, too. Pretty small screen, but I love the Wi-Fi browsing I hold in my hand.) The expectations were as high as the stock price yesterday morning, $208. Not even Apple, which could polish up a river stone and sell it as technology, could create the magical device the tech world dreamed up over the last few months. At least not in a 1.0 release, while protecting its lucrative phone, iPod and Mac businesses.

I’ll be goofy enough to buy an iPad soon. No guarantees on iPad success. It may take awhile, since Apple wants to open a new niche. What a concept — selling hardware to people who don’t own your products yet, trying to create demand. Watch the slick opening salvo in Apple’s rollout party video. Don’t expect Apple to give up, like it did on its Newton, on this one.

The iPad is supposed to start to ship by late April, one month earlier if you want the more less expensive Wi-Fi models without 3G. There’s no camera of any kind, still or video, something of a disappointment. No ability to video-Skype from an iPad, alas. And you won’t be able to do more than one thing at a time, which will keep the Apple notebooks a protected niche in the mobile product lineup. Cue the screaming from the world of multitasking fans. This is a bit of good news for Palm and its Pre — which employs a screen about one tenth the size of the iPad. Of course, that Pre’s a phone, too. The iPad has a built-in microphone, so it could be used for Skype-style calling.

The Apple.com site has extensive technical specs and a sassy sales video. A lot of what this tablet can do is best observed from Apple’s video. Significant strides have been made in display technology (for reading, and sharing the screen), enabled by Apple’s custom-built chip to drive the whole device.

Shots from today’s rollout showed the scale of the tablet as well as the interface:

The device will run “just about every iPhone app unmodified,” so it’s got business applications immediately. More than just Maps or Mail, but also every customized app aimed at niches use like medical reporting or scientific testing. Apple will double the pixels on an app that comes up on the iPad.

When considering that ATT is the only 3G provider here at first release, it might as well be considered a Wi-Fi only device– because the only useful data plan for 3G is $30 monthly. If you already use an iPhone, this will be an extra data charge. On the other hand, you might downgrade your phone away from the iPhone, if you can use the 3G experience in the larger format. The summary:

Apple’s entered the processor derby with this product, a reinforcement of its love of control of the entire offering. The iPad runs on an Apple-built 1GHz chip, the A4. That’s a first; Apple has used chips built by other suppliers in all of its devices up to now.

Apple promises 10 hours of battery life on a charge and a 1-month standby time. That would improve on the standby time of the Kindle — you can’t leave that unattached for a month and expect it to come to life. But 10 hours advertised will be less than that in actual use. Steve Jobs demonstrated the product and said he could fly to Tokyo and watch video the entire time. Good luck on using the product with the Internet for 10 hours. We’d bet that in practice the battery will last probably somewhat more than average iPhone use. But compared to a notebook, and the 10 hours sounds good.

McGraw-Hill has said its textbooks will be available on the iPad, and the New York Times is hoping to sell articles through the iTunes store. The whole paper — rendered as a product you purchase for the iPad — looked like this:

But the motherlode, what’s could give it an edge over Amazon’s Kindle, is the included iBooks software and the iBookstore. Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, Hachette, five of the six biggest publishers, are on board. Here’s a shot via Engadget of iBooks:

Most important to the average business user who’s making a mobile device do the work of a Mac is the iPad’s keyboard. Here’s a shot of the onscreen keyboard at the introduction.

as well as the 10-key pad running below while using Apple’s Numbers application. Numbers and Pages (the iWork apps) will run on the iPad. And Apple says that Numbers and Pages are going to cost just $9.99. This is one of the reasons why Apple bothered to create these competitors to Word and Excel. They can control the price of their users’ tools.

But the best business aspect of this new computing device — and this is unlike anything mobile released for serious business use — is a dock that includes a keyboard. You don’t have to use a virtual keyboard on the screen, if you’re at a desk working.

This device is going to generate more than revenue for the hardware part of the solution. A new Apple iBookstore joins the App Store and the iTunes store. Books are going to be more costly at the iBookstore, at $12.99 to $14.99 — about in line with the Sony eReader titles.

If you own an iPod Touch, this iPad is a book-sized version of that device, sans microphone — but with external input options and 3G capability. Considering the Touch’s cost today, the price of $499-$829 for the iPad looks like it might attract more business users to Apple’s multi-touch interface experience.