when it was first announced earlier this year i was pretty skeptical like the majority of the planet is right now. i'm a big apple fan anyway, i love my iphone and macbook pro - which makes it kinda difficult to justify getting an ipad. initially i was trying to think of what uses i would have for one, which i could think of about three. before i bought my macbook i used to have a dual monitor setup with a custom made pc, so i thought it'd be kinda cool to be able to use the ipad as a second screen for my macbook, which it turns out you can!
second use i thought of was being able to use the ipad as an expensive wireless mouse and keyboard for when my macbook is connected to my tv (for watching movies and tv shows, etc) - i could already do this with my iphone but the screen is so small it's pretty fiddly and kinda unusable. i use iteleport but here's something similar.my third reason i came up with was purely how much of my iphone battery it'd save. the iphone is great and it does so much that you find yourself using it alot. it's main power drain is playing games. when your playing on a psp or a nintendo ds battery isn't too much of an issue when you need to go out, but when the battery your draining is your only source of communication when your out and about it becomes a pain when you've spent all morning playing games and need to go out in the afternoon.
in the time between it being annouced and released in the uk i read alot of stuff online about it. all the gadget blogs showing off all the innovative ideas people were trying and new uses people were finding for it. i also read alot of the columns from the haters. it's impossible to please the haters even if you invent 'the perfect product' let alone one that appears useless to someone with a smart phone and a laptop of some form. and i agree, it's a difficult sale to those people.
when the pre order was announced i figured i'd take the plunge anyway and if it sucks i'll just ebay it. but i've been using it for a week now and although i was skeptical at first after trying it i get it, and i love it. i understand it's not for everyone and that's fine but i think over time people are going to find more and more uses for the thing.
when it first turned up i'd never actually seen one before, but it was smaller and lighter than i was expecting. in comparison to my macbook pro it's alot smaller and lighter and for what i use my macbook for, i think i'd take my ipad if going away for a week but as the ipad is right now, it'd would never replace my macbook completely.
it's really useful to just have this large screen device that's instantly on and ready to use when you need it - no boot up times. it's great to get online instantly and check a few web sites, emails, youtube, twitter, facebook, whatever. i know you can argue that you can do all that on your smartphone but it really is so much better on a bigger screen. after using the ipad for a while the iphone seems way to small to be doing the same things.web sites look really good on the big ipad screen and function really well with the touch screen scrolling, panning around and pinch to zoom that was introduced on the iphone. the obvious weakness with web browsing is the lack of flash support, but to be honest i haven't found it too big of a deal. youtube works and the bbc iplayer works so that's about 80% of the videos i watch online anyway. and why would you want flash games when you can play much better games from the app store, designed for a touch screen device.
comics are amazing on the ipad. i'm not a big comic fan but there's still a few out there i've been meaning to read for a while, so i've been holding out till the ipad todo some catching up. there really isn't any device out there as good for reading comics. the marvel app rocks! but there's also other comic reader apps that will read cbr, rar or pdf files.
games look and play great. the iphone really paved the way for touchscreen games but it's main weakness for gaming is that the screen is too small to incorporate the display and controls at the same time. to control alot of games your fingers end up covering about 50% of the screen in some cases. i really cannot recommend plant vs zombies enough, but after playing it's hd version on the ipad the game feels as if it was designed to be played on this device. it looks and plays so much better than it's pc or mac versions.
i think overall the ipad is just a really good media sponge for all forms of content. listening to music, watching movies/tv shows, viewing web sites, reading rss feeds, playing games, viewing photos, podcasts, books, comics, magazines, newspapers, audiobooks, facebook, twitter, youtube, iplayer, emails, instant messaging, and google maps - all thrown together on one well designed, well thought out, fast, simple and intuitive device that isn't too big, or too small to handle all this content. sure there maybe some stuff missing that you wish it had or did but this is a first generation device (the first ipod kinda sucked). apple will add more features and memory to it's future generations and probably offer them for the same price or less, that's just how they roll.
for all the people who think the ipad is useless i suggest you at least try one before making your judgment, i think over time the ipad will become more and more useful and eventually will win alot of people over, and if not they appear to make pretty good cat toys anyway.
as a side note i also found this article quite interesting: understanding ipad - it talks about the ipad being more about consumption than contribution, which does make sense but i think given some time the ipad could help improve with contribution. whether it be via the app store (with apps like brushes) or i think it could also make for a great input device into a pc - an advanced multitouch trackpad with it's own display would have some great uses in video, photo or web editing.
