The iPad 2

I’m the proud owner of a brand-new, 16GB black iPad 2! It’s a truly impressive device, and I really don’t know where to begin. I think I’ll cover the points that really compelled me to get it first:

• The 10-hour battery life is very useful to me for meetings and other events away from home or the desk, as my work laptop will manage merely two hours of battery life. I’m not bringing my laptop to meetings only to go back to paper when the battery dies.
• My work laptop is a 17-inch laptop, which is only portable when my backpack is handy. It’s nice to have a computer that I can use in any situation where I would want one.

Now that I have the iPad, I can relay some of my other impressions:

• There’s not many places where this thing feels slow at all. Only in Safari does it ever feel slow, when trying to whip through a webpage, and the iPad 1 was much worse. Everything else this iPad does, it does beautifully.
• The Smart Cover is truly awesome, but if you use this with a wireless keyboard, it’s a necessity, unless you have some other keyboard-propping implementation. Is the wireless keyboard necessary? Of course not. Does it make typing on the iPad more fun and more efficient? Yes, I think it does. Certainly it’s also usable without the hardware keyboard - I’m just picky about my input methods. I expect to use it for nothing other than typing blog posts and notes, but that’s a lot of my use right there.
• I don’t think I could live with an iPad being any fatter than this. I held an iPad 1 before the 2 was announced and thought to myself “Wow, this is too fat to be comfortable.” Now, it feels heavy, but ergonomically wonderful otherwise.
• FaceTime seemed like something I wouldn’t use, but I found myself in a three-hour-long FaceTime session tonight anyway. I’ll definitely have to do this more often! I’ve got too many friends on the opposite side of Lake Michigan to keep in touch with, to say nothing of my Canadian family members.
• AirPlay is something I think I’ll find myself using on a regular basis - say, I would download a podcast to the iPad, then stream it to the old-school PC that’s plugged into the speaker setup in my living room. Not something I’ll use every day, but a fun feature nonetheless.

One negative impression: the dock connector is more awkward to plug into than the 2/3/4th generation iPod Touches, it’s so slanted. I’ve only plugged into it once though so the jury’s still out on that one.

I don’t have any groundbreaking revelations here, but I’m already sure that this is something I am going to have a lot of fun with. I can’t figure out why anyone would want any other tablet, and this would be an awesome replacement for the average family’s HP or Dell personal craputer.