I had my first go on an iPad today as we're got one at work in the Talis Education team. It's the top of the range 64Gb WiFi + 3G model and I've got the pleasure of having it at home for the evening.
It's (obviously) a beautifully crafted and usable bit of kit, as are all Apple products and I'm normally a big fan with my own iPhone, iPod, MacBook Pro and another MacBook Pro for work but I'm currently still wondering what I'd regularly use the iPad for.
It probably doesn't help that there isn't much installed on the device yet as it was only purchased at the weekend and I don't have the iTunes account password to install anything else on it but after the initial "Oooh!" factor I was longing for my laptop again to actually do things on.
Yes, YouTube looks great on it, The Times iPad app is great and very usable/readable and iBooks is also very nice to use but, for me, personally, I don't think I'd make use of one on a daily basis to justify the expense.
I'm probably not the target audience though. I can imagine that if I did a lot of travelling on public transport or stays in hotels then I'd probably love it just because of the bigger screen and decent web browsing, reading of books/docs and watching some BBC iPlayer stuff. Right now though I hardly ever use public transport and don't travel through work.
We've got it at work to investigate the device now that they are starting to be used in educational contexts and it'll be great to try some app development on it but I think my money will stay in my pocket for now for one of my own.
I'm looking forward to using it more over the coming weeks/months and my opinion may change as we get more apps on it but right now my MacBook Pro and iPhone do what I need perfectly.
Did I write this blog post on it? No, I did this on my MacBook Pro 🙂