My mother is getting an iPad. The dear woman blissfully bypassed the PC era and has never used a personal computer. This isn’t to say she doesn’t have one. There has been a designated Mac in the house for use by grandchildren, and by my mother’s wayward adult children who are challenged to spend more than a day in an Internet-free zone on trips home.

To provide Internet access in the post dial-up era, I labored one summer day to extend an AirPort network from my sister’s house on an adjacent property to and through my mother’s house, via relay stations. Still, my mother, until now, has never used the Internet, and the closest she has come to using a Mac is dusting the dust cover on the keyboard.

That’s all about to change. It’s not that she is information-starved in any way. She has an amazing capacity for news and information consumption from traditional sources such as books, magazines, and TV. Thanks to satellite TV, if my hectic workday keeps me from reading the headlines, a quick call to my mother during my evening commute will usually provide an earful of the day’s top stories filtered through her unique editorial outlook. For years, she has supported and endorsed the use of Apple devices in the educational lives of her grandchildren, but she has never once touched a keyboard.

When the iPad was released last April, my sister and I thought this was a natural device for my mother’s interest in news and information. Perhaps it was my nephew’s enthusiasm for the profusion of apps available, but showcasing Angry Birds and similar digital wares wasn’t an enticement. For all my mother has experienced and endured in life, spending time engaged in aerial assaults of digital pigs isn’t among her desired hobbies. But recently she has come to realize that, as a news and book reader, the iPad is beyond compare. The home screen and icons that will deliver the tailored content she desires makes sense for a no-nonsense consumer. The abundance of easy-to-use news apps and the iBookstore are a winner.

The iPad is an engaging device. Piercing a demographic of older consumers who view the physical keyboard as a step back and not a step forward is an example of how Apple’s tablet product transcends the PC and is ushering in a new era of more intuitive and useful digital devices.

Copyright © 2011 Robert Paul Leitao. Robert Paul Leitao is a contributing editor at ATPM and is author of the Posts At Eventide and The iPad Chronicles blogs.