Yes, it's lighter and it wakes from sleep a bit quicker, but at what price? My laptop weighs less than three pounds, and I have a snap-on second battery that makes it last longer than an iPad too if I want to trade an extra pound or so of weight in return. However, it very much seems to me like a case of spending inordinate amounts of time and energy so that one can have a work environment nowhere near as nice as they had before. There are tons of articles out there about how people have managed to be productive with iPads by setting up shared hosting where they can SSH into a Linux box and run vi with some degree of compromise, so clearly it can be done. I think a lot of people can replace a laptop with a tablet quite easily, but I'm not one of them. I usually take it with me when I travel, but about the only thing I really use it for in those cases is to watch movies on a plane. I'm not a big gamer, but there are a few social games I play to keep in touch with friends and family back in the US, and some of those are much nicer on the tablet than on the smaller screen of a phone. Often if I'm actually sitting at my computer, I'll still pick up the tablet to check my Google Reader feed. It's also the best RSS reading experience available in my opinion. It dings at me when I get an email/chat/whatever, and often it's more convenient to bang out a quick reply on it than to go to a real computer. Mine sits on my coffee table most of the time. A kindle is much cheaper, but I think there's a legitimate use case for "I'm willing to pay more because it does a bunch of other stuff that, while not being vitally important for me, is still nice to have occasionally". If you're one of those people who isn't bothered by reading on a backlit and glossy display, then they make good eBook readers. I think for people like us ("us" here means we want to do things like write code, use ssh, etc.), it's not that easy to find a really compelling use. I have both a first-gen iPad and an Android tablet (yes, I buy too many toys). Want to help me out here? What do you find works better on the iPad than any other device? I'm sure there's a killer use for the iPad - I'm just not sure what it is. But maybe using it as an education platform is the way to go. Our little guy saw the iPad, and immediately said "oh, that has games on it." I then explained this one didn't, yet. Oh, and she did setup the recipe app, which has some promise. And both Hulu and TV.com were a bust (at least the free versions of the sites). It does in fact work as an eBook reader and for Skype, but so does her Galaxy S II - nearly just as well. Her first thoughts were to use it as an eBook reader, a Skype platform and for watching TV (think Hulu and TV.com). Then I thought, I'll hand it off to Shira. It doesn't seem obvious to me how I'd even get photos from DSLR into this guy. My bought used on Craigslist netbook seems to be far more effective at all those tasks than an iPad. I also do a bit of general web surfing and entertainment (watching Hulu, for example). But when I travel, I have pretty specific needs: (1) image backup/storage, (2) publishing photo and text to Blogger, (3) ssh capability and (4) some local development ability (emacs+subversion+sitecopy). My only problem is, other than using it as a test bed, what the heck should I use it for? The user experience, while disorienting compared to Android or Windows, is clearly superb. So now I've got a brand new, super shiny, iPad in my hands. (Technically, I had the idea to buy one, it took Shira to actually go out and make it happen!). I've got a handful of clients who are targeting their sites towards iPads, so it made sense to pick one up to use for development/testing.
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