So I got an iPad…

… and seriously, how predictable is that? No comments from the peanut gallery, thank you.

My one line review of it is, it’s pretty awesome.

Having used it for about a week now, I really think that within a couple of years, devices like this will have made a big dent in use of traditional desktop and laptop computers. For an enormous number of tasks, it’s just a much better experience; the web feels really different when you access things by touching them and swiping them instead of manipulating things through a mouse or trackpad. Things feel more accessible. And of course the form factor of the device makes it ideal for reading web content in bed, on the couch, in a comfy chair, etc.

The laptop is a kluge – it’s not ideal for working at a desk, or anywhere else, but is highly portable and therefore very useful. Suddenly it feels a lot less useful.

Things I’ll ding the iPad for:

• It’s a touch too heavy. Just a touch.
• The screen is a finger-juice collector. A good cloth is a required accessory.
• The touch-screen keyboard is a hundred times better than you think it would be, which means, not great for seriously writing things. I think my bluetooth keyboard will be a very handy accessory.
• iPhone apps run on it, but they look like crap; you either get a little iPhone sized app floating in the middle of the iPad screen, or you can blow it up and get a pixilated version that looks horrible. Keeping track of iPad vs iPhone applications in iTunes is cumbersome; some seem to have both included in one app, which is much, much better.

As many of you know I am also a big fan of the Kindle and a lot of tech media has, rather predictably, talked about an iPad vs Kindle deathmatch. I am in the middle of reading a book* on the iPad – I decided to read the whole thing on the iPad to see what it was like. (I’m using the Kindle for iPad application.)

Because the iPad is a little bigger and noticably heavier, I have to kind of balance it on my belly to read in bed. (Good thing I’m not skinny.) It’s bright, which means I was able to lie on the bed and read with no lights while I had no electricity for 24 hours (don’t ask) and the battery life, while no match for a Kindle’s, is excellent. But that bright screen does wear your eyes out a bit faster than the Kindle’s; not a big deal if you spend 30 minutes or so reading, for a lazy weekend reading marathon (one of life’s great pleasures), I think the Kindle is a better bet.

But… it’s truly gorgeous. Everything is amazingly crisp, and any photos or illustrations – which just look bad on the Kindle – are really lovely. And, turning pages with a quick stroke of the screen is much easier than the Kindle’s page buttons.

So I’m not trading in the Kindle, but I suspect I’ll be reading more on the iPad than I expected to, and if I were going away for the weekend, I’d probably just bring the iPad in lieu of a laptop and the Kindle.

So it’s got some v1.0 issues, but – as they so often do – I think Apple has finally gotten something right that everybody else has been getting wrong. Which is a good thing, as I expect it won’t be long until there are iPad-ish devices based on Android and other OSs in common use. Even if you never use the Apple version, you can thank them for it.

* The book is Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, a faux-history novel, and it’s quite good.