It's a place that's a place.

For those of you who didn’t know, iAd is an advertising platform Apple launched with their 4.0 update for the iPhonePodPad.

I’m no fan of Apple’s, (don’t like their devices much either…) but I think iAd is pretty cool.

When I first saw iAd on the upcoming features of iOS 4, I thought “Yay, even MORE ads to annoy the crap out of us free app users…”
But now that I’ve seen it in action, it’s a pretty cool feature for those of us on older iDevices that aren’t jailbroken (syncing with iTunes makes jailbroken iDevices unhappy. Don’t do it.) because we don’t have multitasking.

If I’m using Stumble or some other app that clears on exit, then I DEFINITELY don’t want to accidentally click an ad because it’ll teleport me to the App Store or Safari and clear what I had open. LAME.

What makes iAd cool is that it opens the ad’s content on top of your open app and you can just close the ad. If the ad would normally go to the App Store, for example, it pops up a window that has the icon, description, screenshots, download button… Sort of like you have the app’s App Store page open on top of your current app. To be honest, I actually prefer the iAd way of downloading apps because it doesn’t kick me out of the app to watch my app download like the App Store does.

All that said, I still like my Zune HD more than my iPhonePod.