Can the iPad really kill the newspaper?

It's 7am: you lean over your toast, pour some orange juice and flick through the morning paper, chewing over the news while chewing your breakfast.

Only, it's not a 'paper' at all, it's a big square lump of plastic, glass and silicon - an iPad, running the top news apps, flashing up the latest headlines.

For thousands, this scene is already a reality - but will a future where every newspaper is delivered digitally, instantly, and in a proper newspaper format, ever become the present?

What the iPad is packing in 2011 is already enough to put the traditional newspaper under threat if you're a Times reader. For £2 a week, you get the latest version of the paper streamed straight to your iPad every morning, with all the same headlines, pictures, text and layout as the traditional print version - except upgraded to be interactive. It literally marries the best bits of both formats into one impressive - and inexpensive - package.

Other news organisations have been slower off the mark, though. None of the others can boast a digital offering as complete or as comprehensive as Murdoch's outlet. But other papers are slowly coming on board, and it's only a matter of time before we see the likes of The Guardian, The Independent and The Sun get their papers digitised.

Even if we do get to the stage where every notable news outlet is offering their own complete-paper app, will it really spell the end for traditional ink and paper news?

Well, there are several hurdles to vault first. For one thing, iPads are expensive. Really, really expensive. Even if the tech-savvy, cash-rich of the 20-40 group gobble up pads and news apps like there's no tomorrow, that still leaves the rather sizeable group of everyone else who still like to read their news from a piece of paper.

Here in Sheffield, there are fiftysomething blokes in peaked caps whom I'm almost certain are never going to trade up their Daily Bilge for the iPad version while chatting about snuff in their local greasy spoon. Joking aside, there are literally millions of people who for one reason or another just won't take to reading newspapers in a digital form, even if it looks largely identical.

One option often mooted among the media is that papers should give free iPads out on a subscription model, like how mobile operators subsidise phones in exchange for your loyalty. To anyone with an interest in news but without the ability to stretch to £600, this is likely to be much more popular.

But even then, asking people to put another monthly subscription on their overheads, let alone carry a hefty slice of news device everywhere they go, is a big step.

But these are teething problems. The fact is, the iPad, Kindle and Android tablets are increasingly becoming home to a like-for-like version of traditional newspapers, complete with turnable pages and all the same content of a newspaper. One day, you'll wake up and each newspaper and magazine you subscribe to will have been wirelessly streamed to you in your sleep.

Whether that really means that one day, one truly sad day, the printing presses really will grind to a halt remains to be seen.

But you can be sure that if that day comes, you'll probably read the news on your iPad.