To Be Or Not To Be

To be or not to be. That is the question. For the iPad 3g that is.

Received my “magical device” this past Friday. Unboxed, loaded, and played. Here are my thoughts.

Overall, I love it. In my humble opinion, not a game changer.

Except possibly with newspapers, magazines, and books. Especially textbooks. Can you imagine school children with one iPad instead of a backpack with 60 pounds of books? With the ability to connect to the internet, define words immediately, create multi-media reports, and on, and on, and on… All untethered. All in one device.

I’m writing this post on the 3g. Not much different than sitting at my desk in front of the laptop. Except it’s on my lap and I’m enjoying a warm early spring day here in the Northeast sitting on my deck (not in direct sunlight, I might add).

When using home Wi-Fi the iPad is ultra fast. Tried the 3g connection from AT&T. Easy sign-up and just as fast. So fast that the lack of multi-tasking is not as bad as might be expected.

Using NewsRack as the RSS feed app. This is where the iPad excels in comparison to a Smartphone. Readability. So much easier and quicker.

Using the app Pages to write this piece. Too many posts about issues with Numbers and Keynote. Mostly because of lack of reliable transfer features with Microsoft equivalents. Let’s face it. Many of us love Apple products. But we are in a PC world. Can’t we all just get along?

Twitterrific and TweetDeck already have iPad maximized apps. Still waiting on Facebook and Linkedin. iPhone apps work on the iPad but are the same size as the iPhone screen. You can increase the size but the app becomes slightly pixilated. Not unusable. But annoying.

Only a few magazines available right now. Time magazine for example. Excellent experience on the iPad. But, terribly overpriced. However, in the marketing world we live in, publishers know that early adopters will pay more. I don’t expect it will be long before prices come down and subscriptions become available. It’s all about the advertising in the mags. More subscribers mean more advertisers who have potential customers just one click away.

Rented a movie from the iTunes store. Up In the Air. (I used to travel a lot. Friends who still do informed that it’s a must see for frequent flyers.) Great resolution. No playback issues. And, for music lovers, the speakers are surprisingly good.

I believe that in the coming weeks and months iPad apps will proliferate. And, I’d bet there will be a goodly number that will be winners.

That’s about it for now. Need to play more.

Let me know your thoughts.