about this new thing

You may have heard about it. The iPad. As a card carrying gadget lover, self-proclaimed Apple lover I knew I had to have one - as soon as it came out.. I’d worry about the use case later. But alas, things turned out slightly different. My wife, who is highly skeptical of all things electronic, came to me the day after the iPad stevenote and said: I’ll have the first one in the house, thank you very much.

So she got the first one, imported by Keith, a day after her birthday and a month before anyone else in her circles would have one. And she uses it daily. Checks her email, carries her calendar around (thanks to our email / calendar being on our Zimbra servers), surfs the web from time to time. I had to wait until the iPads were available over here, and we swapped: she got the 3G enabled one, I got her “old” wifi only device. 6 weeks into the iPad experience she discovered “Angry Birds”. I haven’t seen my wife play computer games ever, but she’s been playing for hours straight today…

Score one for the iPad.

Me? I have only had it with me for a couple of days. While my wife is probably using it in the spirit that Steve intended, I have been busy downloading and buying lots of apps and trying to use it as a device that is not quite a laptop. Seems to work pretty well so farbut only time will tell how good it really is in that role.

My experiences? I like CrowdMap for taking Notes while reading my textbook for the university course. Dropbox is great for retrieving documents in our little cloud. No joy with finding a program that I can use to store documents back to Dropbox. Office2 just doesn’t feel right. I like to play with music: Beatbox is a wonderfully simple sequencer (and I caught my wife playing with it - that was before she discovered Angry Birds…) I look forward t more and better games. I downloAded Reeder today and read my RSS feeds for the first time in months, I’m typing this on the iPad in the Wordpress app, blogging again after a long hiatus. I sold my kindle and read on the iPad - the additional screen estate and the wonderful quality of the PragProg ebooks made this a relatively simple decision.

This is just the beginning - but I feel that this little device really will change the way we work with computers.

(and as a final note for today: typing on the screen is much better than I expected, so I will leave this text as is - typos and all… This is straight what came out of the keyboard)