After digesting all of the available information on the newly announced Apple iPad, it’s becoming pretty apparent where Apple is going with their strategy. Even though Mac has seen huge increases in Mac/Macbook sales, they need another step in order to get the average consumer to make the leap into a $1000 sale.

In comes the iPad, an purported $499 “tablet” that really doesn’t offer any compelling advantage over the iPhone/Touch. What this will enable Apple to do is lead consumers from their phone to a larger experience in the “tablet” which will eventually lead them to a full-fledged laptop. However, this isn’t the interesting part of their strategy.

If the conjecture that the iPad is “just a big iPhone” is true, then shrinking the iPad back down to iPhone size could very well give us a good indication of what we’re going to see this June. Most likely the important piece of the iPad is actually Apple’s first foray into chip making, the A4. Imagine the A4 processor stuffed into an iPhone with all of the visual queues of the iPad. Not only is this exciting to me, but it makes perfect sense.

The iPad now is in a niche market, but since all of the software will be resized to fit the larger screen, we could now very likely see the much anticipated larger screen for the iPhone 4G (iPhone HD?).

If iPhone 4.0 bring along a slew of long awaited changes such as background processing, revamped interface/lockscreen, bluetooth keyboard support, theming, 5mp camera, and other things that make jailbreaking so popular, we can now add to our list the high resolution screen along with an aluminum case. If Apple can figure out how to make the iPad’s antennas work with the aluminum shell, hopefully they can figure it out for iPhone 4G. Seriously, who likes the glossy case on the current 3G/3Gs?

This is a Photoshop of the iPad which I’ve resized and incorporated some changes to try and demonstrate how the next-gen iPhone could look if Apple continues the revamp. It would only make sense because the rest of their product line has the same theme.

Was I right? I guess we’ll find out in June.

Please note that this is a Photoshop render I did based on the iPad artwork available from Apple.com/iPad. It’s not the real thing (yet).