Quick iPad Notes

So I received my 3G iPad on Friday. I thought I’d post some very quick thoughts on it. The gist of it is that I absolutely love it.

So, on to the notes.

• 3G and GPS. I happened to receive my 3G iPad the day before I was going on a long roadtrip. The iPad with 3G and GPS performed perfectly, and we were able to track our trip and get to our desintaiton and back with no trouble at all. It was super impressive.

• Reading is simply fantastic. After being a NetNewsWire user for many years, I simply stopped using RSS this year. I hardly visit websites to read for fun anymore… I simply forget to. Because of the crazy number of feeds I’m subscribed to, reading RSS on my iPhone, with no matter what app I tried, was slow and cumbersome at best. NewsRack for the iPad changes all that. The speed of loading tons of rss feeds is so much faster. I have to remember to try NewsRack for the iPhone, too, but really, iPad RSS is so much better than iPhone RSS.

  As for reading books, the iBook app is good, but the Kindle app is fantastic. The black background mode actually makes the idea of reading a book on a screen feasible.

  Same goes for news. While the New York Times app is lovely, the USAToday app is just plain awesome.

  As for weather… Wow. I’ve tried a few different weather apps, and they’re all great. I have no idea which I like best.

• Writing isn’t as bad as I thought it would be, but it isn’t perfect either. I have a much easier time with the keyboard than I anticipated, but I am certainly not a real typist on this thing just yet. I wrote the bulk of the notes for this post on my iPad, but then moved over to my MacBook Pro to flesh out some of it.

  The writing apps out there for the iPad are really beautiful and will make you want to do all of your writing on it…

  Sorted is the only todo list app I’ve ever liked for any platform. Its simply gorgeous.

  Simplenote is of course my ideal notes app, uses it’s lovely widescreen layout and syncs up perfectly with it’s iPhone counterpart and Notational Velocity on my Macs.

  Pages is really a full featured text editor. Makes me dream of TextMate for the iPad…

• Logmein is a dream on the iPad, especially if you’re someone manages multiple macs. I’ll never have to reach for my MacBook Pro again when wanting to do anything on my Mini that is hooked up to my tv.

• Browsing the web is also fantastic. The funny thing is there is little reason for me to use Safari to visit many of the websites I visit the most due to the fact that they simply all have their very own iPad apps. Really all I need is the Tumblr iPad app, and I’m totally set.

• I just haven’t had the time to try out that many games yet. But I can say that Strategery is the only war-time strategy game (or whatever you call it) that I’ve ever enjoyed… its great!

So… those are my very quick thoughts on my new iPad… what do you think?