Geek4ever

Soooo, iPad. Yeah, that happened. After watching Star Trek years ago, every geek on the planet has wanted a touch style tablet device. There have been many attempts and Apple's iPad is the first one to get most of it right.

Sure it isn't perfect, though the iPad gets the important bits right. Thanks to Apple's early work with the iPhone the iPad is a great device despite being 'version 1'.

Lets start with the main drawbacks:

• Heavy. It's light when you frist pick it up, though hold it for half an hour and you really start to feel the weight.
• Screen can be like a mirror in very bright lights.

Now onto the good bits:

• The battery lasts forever. It's great to pick it up and know that it will be charged and ready to go. After a busy day of using it almost all day I was only at 50%.
• Fast and responsive. You rotate it or use the touch features and it responds instantly.
• Screen is viewable from a lot of wide angles. Unlike my iPhone 3GS which you can't see very well from the side, the iPad is still clear when viewed from a side angle.
• It can do everything I need it to do. I can browse the web, read my mail, check my calendar, watch podcasts and even remotely control my server.

I mainly wanted a web browser in tablet form. Thanks to the app store on the iPad there are so many more things you can do with it I feel like I am only using 10% of it's potential.

The price is quite high at the moment, though as no one else has bothered to come to market with anything remotely competitive it's hard to complain, though I won't let that stop me. ;-)

Developers are making good use of the extra screen real estate. For example The IMDB iPad app is so great that it is a better experience than using the IMDB website.

Overall I have to say that I am quite happy with the iPad and look forward to what more cool things developers will come up with.

Oh yeah, it isn't magical.