iPad

pros:

• insane battery life, best of any portable device in the market at the moment; it’s a great feeling to finally be truly mobile without having to worry about my device's battery life

• portable, sleek, negligible weight in a backpack; extended periods of holding in the hands may be tiring for some though (but that’s just commonsensical)

• execution of a portable in typical apple fashion, well designed, apps are abundant, experience is great

• safari works as it should, pity about the exclusion of adobe flash, apparently flash kills the battery life (based on certain reports, go google them if flash is important to you)

• 10inches seem about the optimal size for hand-held browsing of books, websites; however, not so for videos, seems a little silly to holding such a large screen, but still, if you can deal with holding it when there isn’t a table or surface handy, it works great

• the screen is gorgeous, inspite of the somewhat dated 1024x768 resolution; I was expecting retina-like density of pixels, but I believe the chosen hardware are due to technical and engineering issues

• ipod is excellent (as expected), the screen real estate makes this a wonderful toy for wannabe party music control nazis

• love the news apps, picture browsing apps of gettys, life, etc

cons:

• itunes is still a bloody huge mess in my humble opinion (coming from a windows user. Oh, the irony!), and does not play nice with windows, it would seem its more of a difference in oses that causes most of the problems i have with itunes than itunes itself being a flawed piece of software

• that being said, i detest having to go through the app store for every single app, song, book, etc, but its essential (my opinion and reasoning for the need to go through itunes for every single thing) to control the market for the sake of and excellent user experience. u suffer a little every way.

• good apps cost money, but most i've paid for so far are well executed for the price one pays

• it’s only a matter of months before a newer and better version is out.

what it is:

• great PORTABLE web-surfing device; that is if you do not mind the lack of adobe flash support (personally, it wasn't such a big deal for me)

o however, I believe there’ll eventually be a workaround of sorts in the future

• keeps the internet junkies (like myself) constantly connected (as long as you have access to 3G or wifi)

• great for movies with the right app with decent codec support (hint: VLC app)

• great for spontaneous/casual writing or jotting down of ideas on the go; i.e. pairing up with the wireless apple keyboard and you'll have a killer combination for mobile novel/article/note creation

• great ebook and comic reader, color comics pop, great zoom controls for the smaller text

what it isn't:

• it is possible for road warriors, with the right word processing software apps, to be able to churn out simple reports and the like on the go; that being said, the ipad isn't going to replace the macbooks or most of our laptops in that department anytime soon, as i personally feel one would still fare better in the battle with our documents with a full-fledged mouse and keyboard combination in hand.

• it isn't a complete replacement (internet surfing-wise) for our desktops either, as the exclusion of flash and possibly certain https protocols for online transactions can be quite a glaring ommission for a certain percentage of users out there, however, it you’re just tumblr-ing or checking in on your social life on facebook, the ipad makes the experience quite delightful

minutae observations:

• apple still the king of touch computing, swipe and pinching is liquid smooth

o current andro-pads out in the market are still quite a ways behind in the experience. Let’s see if gingerbread or even honeycomb can address the tablet issues manufacturers are facing

• iOS4.2 for ipad is out finally, and I’ve been enjoying the ‘multi-tasking’ it has on offer

o game center is a nice-to-have kind of add-on, giving one easy access to online games that are currently popular

apps to get:

• Flipboard – integrates your favourite websites' headlines and facebook feeds into a magazine-like format for easy/classy browsing

o Alternatively, Pulse is pretty good too for summarising a feed of all your favourite websites

• iBooks – apple's own ebook reading app

• VLC player – updated periodically, getting better with each iteration

• TED – source if information and inspirational videos by industry experts and players

• LIFE – tonnes of galleries or browsing

• SG Mahjong – (proper mahjong game instead of the crappy card matching one)

• IM+ – for instant messenging on the go with support for all the major IMs (yahoo, gtalk, msn, facebookchat, etc) the free version limits push notifications to 2hrs though.\

• Discover – makes a nice magazine-like article out of any subject in wikipedia, among other things

• Pool Bar – paid game that rocks, since im such a huge pool fan

• FlickrStackXP – a great browsing app for flickr-fans

• Radiant HD – free, galaga-style game with updated graphics and amusing storyline, I wasted half a day on it =p