What do you want me to say?
The iPad 2 is beautiful. It's amazing. It provides a great platform for all kinds of media, from headline news to long-form journalism to TV to movies to games about launching birds into pigs. It is incredibly easy to use, has a remarkable display and everything you've heard about the quality of its applications are true, and then some.
None of this is new information, of course. If you're interested in buying an iPad you've read a million and one reviews telling you as much.
When the iPad came out, I'll admit I was in the camp that spent no shortage of time making fun of it-I never saw the point of a giant iPod Touch and figured it was just because people naturally gravitated toward anything Apple made. Of course, today I consider myself an iPad convert, having seen the light of what it can do.
There's no way of getting around it, playing with an iPad is quite a lot of fun and it just looks cool. Apps from Esquire, with its awesome page design, to the live-streaming from networks like ESPN, to the simple pleasure of Angry Birds are all improved by being on the big screen. The possibilities with those great apps to change how you consume almost any form of electronic media is limitless-if, of course, you can pay for it all.
That is the obvious stumbling block with the iPad (our 16 gb version was $499 at the DoIT Tech Store), not to mention the perhaps unforseen cost of all of those pretty apps.
The New York Times isn't free any more, magazines that have free content online charge for it on an iPad and, while the device is a great platform for services like Netflix and Hulu Plus, they of course require subscriptions. It's one benefit of tablets of course-they've finally given news outlets a way to make money again -but it can be a curse for us free-loaders.
Still, if you can stomach the price you'll be rewarded with a fascinating and endlessly impressive device.
On Monday night, I used an iPad to watch a live NHL game, then I watched an episode of "Community," and later I called my brother on FaceTime and he told me he's going to be a father in June. He told me that, and I watched him and his wife say it on a 10-inch screen.
Did I really need an iPad to do that? No, of course not. There are very few things, perhaps none at all, that you can do on an iPad and can't do on a laptop or iPhone-that was the case when it came out, and it hasn't really changed with the second iteration.
But that's not the point of an iPad: You don't need it, but you sure as hell want it. And if you want it enough you'll pay for it. If not, you can still do everything an iPad user can do-you'll just do it without one more incredible device.
