The iPad

I spent a lovely afternoon with my friend Andrea, who is a Macophile. I'm a PC girl myself; I have been ever since I was a junior volunteer at the National Science Center and learned to navigate Windows 3.X. So it is with a slight bias that I view all of the Mac offerings.

I own an iPod. It is not the favorite MP3 player I have ever owned. That went to a tiny generic $50 player in 2000 that was the size of a big pack of gum and ran off any size SD flash drive. Unfortunately, it was so tiny, it was lost on one of UGA's buses one day. I've mourned its loss ever since, and I consider the iPod and various other MP3 players I've owned to be inadequate substitutes. I'm slowly reconciling myself with iTunes, but I get miffed whenever I want to buy a song and I get told that it's not available for sale in my region. (It's as if they want me to pirate sometimes! Even when I try to be good.)

I have never owned any Mac product bigger than my iPod. My cell phone is an ancient Motorola V276 that I will use until it disintegrates. I'm too poor for Mac laptops and I instead have an Acer Aspire One netbook that cost me $250 last year.

So when I went to visit Andrea, and see her shiny new gadget, of which she is so immensely proud, I was prepared to Not Be Impressed In The Least. Much to my surprise, the iPad has some fairly respectable shinies to it. The most amazing thing is the nonexistent load times for movies from Netflix, and television programs. Beautiful HD resolution shows are beamed into the iPad faster than it takes Firefox to even load the website at Hulu on my PC. No lag, no stuttering.

As wonderful as this is, I can't think of it as justification for me to buy one - I rarely watch television or movies, preferring to consume my entertainment from the written word.

In that regard, the iPad is also quite nice. The eBook format used is clean. I could almost see myself reading a whole book start to finish using it. I still like the weight of an actual volume in my hand, and the smell of decaying wood pulp in the library, but I'm old fashioned.

What killed the iPad for me was the typing. Trying to type on the electrostatic keyboard felt awkward and unnatural. For a touch-typist like me, who is used to writing things into the computer while looking at the place they were originally written down, it was a bit humbling to be slowed down so much and being forced to actually look at the keypad. Andrea pointed out that it is compatible with any wireless Bluetooth keyboard, but if the idea is to replace my netbook, I shouldn't have to carry around a separate keyboard just to type comfortably.

My verdict: If you have a terrible cable company like Comcast or Dish Network, and you wish to ditch them while at the same time you want to watch TV shows and movies any time you like, on demand, in perfect HD resolution, then grab an iPad. Even if you're not usually a Macophile, you will love it to pieces.

But if you're not a visual medium person (like me), and you just want a portable laptop that you can write on (or play FFXI or WoW or Farmville on, since the iPad can't do any of those), then stick with a cheap netbook.