Some months ago before the iPad became available outside of the USA I wrote a piece about the product. I said at the time that I would probably delay buying an iPad in its initial version because of perceived technical limitations indicated by early reviewers. However when the product became available in the UK I found it to be an irresistible product and purchased one almost immediately after the IPEX exhibition. This could have been due to the impact the product had on me when I saw it in use at IPEX by a few USA based journalists, but I was convinced that I wanted one. Perhaps I even felt I needed one.

So now that I have had my iPad for a couple months, the obvious question is, what do I think of it and how do I use it? Has it, in fact, become become an important part of my life? In my earlier article I made the following comment:

This brings the question of what is the iPad for and what does it do? This to my mind shows the genius of Apple in that the iPad is an innovation platform that allows it to do whatever you, or in reality the application (Apps) developers, want it to do. In this it is fundamentally different to the E-readers such as the Amazon Kindle that have preceded the iPad. These devices are defined for one role and thus are limited to just that use. The iPad platform is a digital toolbox and display system. For me I am perhaps being overly ambitious in seeing it as both a replacement for my laptop as well as being a media reader for both traditional and electronic media. At present I find my smartphone works as a laptop replacement for short trips for handling email, calendar, address book and very simple web access. On the basis of what I can do on my phone I see the iPad being like a large format smartphone but with a creative writing capability. Currently the reviews I have read show that Version 1 of the iPad lacks some key functionality to be a laptop replacement in areas such as no multitasking and lack of a file manager that prevents adding attachments to emails. I would expect some of the current limitations to be removed at the first update of the iPad's operating system, probably later this year.