Actually, I've had one for 5 days since it arrived Monday morning but I looked over my wife's shoulder anxiously as she started using hers a week ago today.
I also listened to the iPhone OS 4.0 announcement and am glad to hear some things, could care less about others, and am a little scared of one.
There's a part of me that wonders if we will see a re-hash of the 90s Microsoft episodes with anti-trust monopoly stuff.
That aside, back to the iPad.
I like it, I like it a lot. I won't be returning it. I am finding a use for it. This morning I even did my morning web, RSS, and mail routine for the first time and it worked pretty well. Still not the same as a laptop, for better or worse. I'll elaborate on that later.
As to the keyboard, I'm slowly trying to find a way to be efficient with it but it's not going to be in my regimented taught by the girls' high school PE teacher/coach method with a piece of paper above my fingers on the IBM Selectric sort of way. My fingers are slowly becoming a hyperactive spider as they attempt to do a tap-tap-revenge sort of dance hovering above the virtual keyboard looking for the next light to flash. I'm definitely not efficient but I'm getting better. Of course this only works when the iPad is sitting in my lap or on a flat surface. For on-the-go typing, I'd love to have a 2-handed keypad, one where keys are arranged in 2 vertical columns with a set on the left an right hand side of the screen. Ideally this should be user-definable, after all, it is all software.... I could kick butt typing this way.
Multi-tasking--not that big of a deal to me for the most part though the omission is more noticeable on the iPad than the iPhone or iPod Touch. I'm not making Skype calls but if I were, I would like to be able to do other things while talking. So that's coming soon anyway. I will say that in some regards, I'm glad that multi-tasking isn't available. On my laptop I find myself juggling back and forth between mail, IM, RSS, and my we browser and I think I lose a bit of efficiency with trying to get back up to speed on each as I shift back and forth. Multi-tasking also makes me feel a bit more captive with the computer. I think I can better concentrate on the task at hand on the iPad because I can only do one thing at a time.
Printing, what the heck, where is printing??? I really want native printing from the iPad/iPhone. It wasn't that big of a deal on the iPhone but it's highly visibly missing on the iPad. The 3rd party apps all require a service running on your desktop/laptop computer to hand off the printing jobs. I really want this to be native.
File browsing/access. This also needs to be native. I have a small reasonably priced app, FileBrowser, and it works well enough for what it is but I'd really like to see a native space on the device for file storage/access, not this hack with the iWork apps where you only sync the files when they're synced on the wired in iTunes. BTW, with FileBrowser, my wife can connect to our NAS and view any of her MP4 movies over the wireless, no syncing necessary there!
As everyone else has said, the thing is fast, easy to use, the lust and envy of others, collects finger grease like nobody's business, is perfectly sized, and rocks.
We're seeing more and more of the iPhones/iPod Touch/iPads and as they proliferate, the business and computing use of them will continue to grow. I fully appreciate Apple wanting to leave opportunities for developers and maybe that's why they've not properly addressed the file browsing and printing but all the 3rd party stuff just doesn't work like it would if it were native to the OS.
The iPad is super cool, it is holding the future, it's the closest to a practical implementation of a slate/tablet device yet. Yes, it many regards it's a giant iPod or iPhone, but it makes you realize just how awesome the potential of those can be with a practical-sized device.
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