As soon as His Steveness announced the iPad I started to make fun of it. The name sounds like a sanitary napkin, the concept is basically "blow up the iPod Touch," and honestly it just seems like a incomplete device, considering it doesn't have a camera and the SD card slot (which they knew people would want) is extra. For me, this would be a second (third) device. I have my iPhone for walking around, I have my MacBook Pro for working at my desk and I'd have the iPad for everything in between like recipes while cooking and looking for stuff on the internet while watching TV. It would definitely be a better device to have by my nightstand if i wanted to quickly catch up with news from bed because at 1.5 lb its still light enough to carry with one hand. The laptop always seemed awkward in bed. Then he announced the price. I have wasted $500 on other things that I dont find nearly as useful as I would find having an iPad would be (my original MiniDisk player comes to mind.) I am, however, the fanboy. I will buy this device because I like playing with shiny new toys. Where I think this will be amazing, is in the hands of my mom. For people like my mom, the $500 price tag and the gorgeous UI makes total sense. My mom doesn't really deal with computers often. Her computer was kind of acting up and she decided to get a new one, she got a netbook. Now she has a contract and a computer thats too slow to actually do anything useful. On top of that, it uses Windows XP which is not really a OS that is inviting to the user, you use it because you have to not because you want to. 60 days from now I am going to be getting a iPad in the mail. I will play with it thoroughly and then I will give it to my mom. The iPhone OS is intuitive and she will be able to get things done faster. She'll learn to love the internet because she wont have to fight with it most of the time. She'll be able to do e-mail without worrying about getting a virus or forgetting what the email address of her contacts are because everything syncs with the cloud. Most of her documents are on Google Docs now anyways so she can just work right on the cloud with the device and not worry about losing her USB thumbdrive or anything like that. For the longer projects, a cheap bluetooth keyboard allows her to work with iWork and really get presentations and projects done in a flash (She's a teacher.) Best of all, there are zero headaches. It just works. There are no configurations that can go wrong, there are no drivers she has to update, there is no way she can accidentally lose information. How do I know this? Because I've been using iPhone OS for 2.5 years now and the urge of moving to Android always subsides when I think of that. I was not impressed with the iPad when I saw it because I didn't see the possibilities for people who really just want to move on from having to deal with "computers" but cant just use their phones as their main device. When my dad plays with my mom's iPad I'm sure he'll want one too. I'll hand him the one I got to replace the one I gave to my mom, just in time for me to buy v2 sometime next year.
The Apple iPad, I'm getting Three
· 5 min read