Who knows how the iPad will ultimately be used? Certainly no one at this early date.
Is it merely an ebook reader, or is it a gaming device? Could it be an honest-to-goodness tool for business?
Like so many things, it all depends on your expectations.
It’s well known by now that early impressions of the iPad find it pooh-pooed by the technorati and generally lauded by the great unwashed as a fantastical window (if you’ll excuse the pun) into the future of mobile computing.
The highly regarded founder of Daily Kos, one of the Internet’s most widely read blogs, weighed in Sunday with a wide-ranging, detailed review of Apple’s latest creation and pronounced the iPad a gadget that “scored big as … a device that makes my life easier,” calling it “better than a laptop.”
Of course Marcos only needs something that will work “for basic word processing, downloading and viewing business documents (like PPT presentations), web, and email.” But for him, “It did those tasks perfectly.”
One of the twitterverse’s big topics this weekend had to do with the propriety of Apple’s insistence on maintaining control over the kinds of applications that will run on the iPad. Marcos’ opinion is that, in the end, “if you don’t like it, no one will make you buy it.”
For his part, Marcos says, “I can use the iPad for about 90% of what I do on my laptop. As a travel machine, it was a huge success.”
