Resistance was futile. Once I had played with a demo iPad for 2 minutes and it was clear that the Apple Store at Bluewater was well stocked, there was only one possible outcome. 24 hours later and I’ve hardly had it out of my hands. 1- I’m finding the typing far more accurate than on my iPhone, as you would expect. It’s the size of the keys that makes the difference, not the fact that it’s a soft keyboard. 2- The resolution of images on the screen is very high. The built-in use as a digital photo frame is highly effective and watching Andrew Marr on BBC this morning (streamed on TVCatchup not iPlayer) in the kitchen was remarkably sharp. 3- Any app optimised for the iPad is very nice indeed. if it’s an iPhone app the zoom just makes it fuzzy. 4- The iWork apps are first class, especially Pages. This gives you an option to open either a downloaded Word file from Dropbox or a Word email attachment in a proper word processor not just a viewer. It doesn’t cope though with tracked changes. Instead it accepts any changes in the document and just gives a nice display. Same with Excel and Numbers (although it didn’t have enough memory to cope with a 25MB Excel file I downloaded from Dropbox) and I haven’t got to the normally excellent Keynote ye 5- Battery life is holding up very well at around 10 hours. I bought the £30 case and it is pretty good at propping it up or acting as a stand. Very clever alternatives will no dot emerge from the aftermarket. 6- I haven’t tried to read a novel yet but will load a couple before my next holiday. The indexing, dictionary and search functions are pretty slick. The iBook store is not comprehensively stocked yet but its march will no doubt be inexorable as iTunes has proved. The page-flicking is dead easy and very forgiving to minimum effort. I have not read anything for long enough yet to suffer any star in from reading a back-lit display. 7- I’m not a gamer but have had a go at Scrabble and may look at Chess and Bridge Baron. 8- Signing up to a 3G service was a royal pain in the arse so I’ve parked that until after the holiday weekend. 9- I’ve even played around with our prototype web app on it. Exceptionally interesting potential there. 10- For surfing in front of the tv it’s pretty perfect.

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