I’ve had some time to explore the competencies and potential of my iPad, since its delivery on Saturday. 
For me, at least, it’s already a game or habit changing device. Like any connected person, I’m not at a loss for screens in my life, but iPad has extended my screen time and opened up new opportunities for exploring and experiencing online content and extending productivity, and that’s without a significant number of apps installed. I purchased Pages and Keyword immediately after initializing the device. Both are beautifully ported over from the Mac OS to these iPhone OS versions. POP mail settings were a little tricky to sort out, but my Gmail accounts were set up in a minute. WiFi connectivity is, as others have experienced, not as robust as on a MacBook, or iPhone. But last night, I sat in bed checking and replying to e-mail, and catching up on the WSJ and TechCrunch sites and news.
I believe Safari will prove to be the ultimate iPad app. The web experience is just fantastic on the device. All my bookmarks have been synced and so far, every site I frequent that looks great on the iMac or MacBook mirrors the experience on iPad. It’s interesting – so many print and magazine publications appear distracted by building apps for the device. My belief is that the time, resources and investment would be better spent on re-tooling their web experience so that it can be enjoyed on browsers, AND iPad. For the foreseeable future, the pure web audience will be many orders of magnitude greater than the iPad audience. Hundreds of millions vs. millions of users. Their apps investment may help Apple sell devices, but it’s not necessarily going to boost their own bottom line. To quote Marshall McLuhan – the first content in a new medium is the old medium. New apps, will be the new content, and help define this new medium. I can’t wait to see where this device takes computing!
Lastly, price… before buying iPad, and even after using it for a couple of days, I’ve thought about it in the context of some of my other early adopter purchases. I recall paying around $525 for a Palm Vx in the late ’90s, the same for a great Compaq iPaq around 2001 – neither of which had the platform, connectivity, native software or Apps iPad has. But the iPaq did support Windows and allowed PowerPoint, Excel, Word and Outlook – however, it only synced through a cable to my (at the time) Dell laptop. I paid at least $400 for a Palm 650 phone in 2004, and almost $500 for a Samsung (SCH-i730) Windows Mobile phone in 2005… in its day a fantastic handset, which worked seamlessly with Windows, and supported Slingbox’s mobile streaming app. On the basis of these comparative devices, iPad isn’t an overpriced purchase. Instead, I’m already looking forward to less expensive, even more feature-rich future versions.
