Magical and Revolutionary Temptation

I gave in to temptation. I don't plan to buy any books to read on it, or movies to watch on it. The public library is doing a fine job of providing me books and movies, all free. Yet I'm now an iPad owner. Yup, 64-GB and WiFi only. I was considering the 3G model but I feared that with round-the-clock Internet access I won't get much else done in my life. The monthly fee does not help then the news of the security breach on AT&T's server killed the idea.

I actually went to my local Best Buy on Friday morning to try to buy it. There was only one iPad left in the whole store, ONE! Just a WiFi, 32-GB model. I took a few moments to mull it over, then some woman came to the salesman and eagerly bought it. I should have left the matter alone. Instead, in the evening I went to the Best Buy at Broadway and Houston Street to ask about their availability. They only had 64-GB models, for both 3G and WiFi. This time I acted fast and moments later walked out of the store an iPad owner, another lemming in Steve Job's Field of Distorted Reality...

Is it really magical and revolutionary? I cannot tell yet, having only synced the MacBook's old content from the dead iPod Touch to it. Old apps made for the smaller screens of iPhone and iTouch can be viewed at 2x magnification and are surprisingly not bad at all. No pixelation here! With more room both on the laptop (200+ vs. the old laptop's 75 or whatever) and the iPad (64 GB vs. the dead iTouch's 16), I plan to add more of my music CD and subscribe to more podcasts, maybe even some video-based ones.

I sure wish the background photo is something else though. Those nice streaking lines in the sky may look nice to some people, but one of the streaks briefly got me worried that it was a crack on the pristine screen. I simply rotated the thing to confirm that it was not a crack, whew!

With the Pad, I plan to do much web-surfing and emailing, perhaps more frequent blogging, once I get the Bluetooth keyboard. I don't plan to totally abandon the MacBook Pro with regards to Facebook. I know people who only interact with Facebook via their iDevice and totally miss out on a lot of what FB has to offer, warts and all. Besides, Wordscraper does not work on the Pad anyway. I wonder if there is some FB word games that has human interaction and does not require Flash... In a related note, I was pleasantly surprised that dailymile.com's route-creating routine worked fine on the Pad, albeit somewhat cumbersome as the screen is not big enough.

Here are some unboxing photos. When I can get the Pad from my son's cold, stubby fingers, I may make a short video with it.