My impressions of the iPad after a couple of days of using it.

First off, this thing is a little heavier than it should be. I wouldn't mind having just one battery, with the ability to add on our snap in the additional battery. I think the limitation of only having a five-hour battery would be worth it given the decrease in weight. That said, the battery life on this thing is really 10 hours+, they weren't lying on that. You can use it all day, and not need to recharge it.

It's a little awkward to hold it. It seems to be great when you're using it on a desktop. Or if you're laying down it seems to work fine. But, when you're just sitting within your lap, it's a bit awkward. One-handed operation is possible with the iPhone, but not necessarily so with the iPad. It's no wonder that the demos that Apple created showed the users with it on their lap rather than holding it in the air. Holding it up by while your using it in your lap gets tiring. Of course, Well by the extra screen real estate really quickly. when the iPhone came out, I said that you can use it one-handed, which turned out to not be the case.

You get spoiled by the extra screen real estate very quickly. What's really interesting is having used this and then going back and using the iPhone. The iPhone feels really small now.

Some of the quirks that I'd like to see addressed:

• Muscle memory in my fingers has been trying to hit the delete key in the wrong spot all the time. It's a little disjointing moving back and forth from an iPhone app to an iPad app on the iPhone, mostly because of the placement of the keys. I keep reaching for the delete key in the wrong places.
• Also the apostrophe key needs to be more prominent on the iPad keyboard.
• WiFi reception is sketchy at times. I get five bars and I get one bar for no good reason. (Seems like a firmware issue)
• Why are you making me buy a calculator? One should be included.

The good news is that all of this can be addressed via a software update.

Magazines and Newspapers
I'm not sure what time of the magazine companies are thinking with their pricing on their iPad versions. Five dollars for Time magazine that you can pay less than three dollars for the news stand? I don't think they get it. There are some nice interfaces for them though, especially Popular Science. (Here's a good video showing off the art direction.)

The Wall Street Journal has a nice interface too, but it's really slow because it fetches and preloads ALL the articles and images when you launch it. Not sure I'll pay a subscription, it's not like I was reading it already, but it's a nice experience if you're into that paper.

iBooks
Apple's iBooks app is a good start, but I won't be buying any books for it until there is an iPhone client, and support for notes and highlighting. I had already been using the Kindle app on my iPhone to read a couple of books, and now I can sync my bookmarked location between my iPhone and my iPad, allowing me to whip out my iPhone to read a book while waiting at Anna's swim lessons, etc. I'm sticking with the Kindle app for now.

So Many Things Are Right On
There are a lot of things that the iPad gets completely right. E-mail and web browsing is fantastic on it. With the new iPhone software update coming over the next few days (hopefully) e-mail will be even better because of the unified keyboard. Photo scrolling and Safari zooming in and out really is as responsive as in the videos. And it really is like holding the web in your hands.

As soon as I can find the perfect note-taking app, I'll be even happier with it.

Favorite apps so far:
Twitepad
Good Reader
Plants vs Zombies
Kindle