Okay, so a few months back, I got tired of waiting for the Android world to get their tablet act together, and bought a refurbished Mark I iPad from the Apple store.
This is the part where I’m supposed to wax eloquent about how this magical device changed my life, right?
Meh.
I use it occasionally. Not nearly as much as I use my Kindle (smaller, lighter, optimized for reading). Safari is my next-to-least-favorite browser (bottom honors go to the big blue ‘E’ of course) and I miss all my Firefox and Chrome extensions. It would be a great platform for little Flash games but, well. And critically, the keyboard, like every other virtual keyboard I’ve ever tried, sucks.
Kindle is a well-crafted specialty device. A laptop is a well-conceived general-purpose device (though in practice, often badly executed). In principle, iPad is also a general-purpose device; but for my purposes, if it doesn’t allow fast and easy note-taking, it’s just not general-purpose enough.
So, there apparently is huge market for tablets out there; but it doesn’t include me.
I would love to have a general-purpose machine about that size, though a physical keyboard is a must-have. Windows is almost a must-not-have, especially not the emasculated version they allow for netbook use. I may be in the market for an ASUS Transformer or a MacBook Air.