The iPad Cometh

So I know a lot of geeks.

Besides Xeni, who is cool beyond recordable temperature readings (she got an advance one), I was confident that at least one of my friends would have the iPad the moment it was released.

Guess what? I was right!

The story I got was that he was on his way to buy a juicer - yeah, that's the ticket - when he ran into a stranger at the mall. Said stranger was unmistakably carrying a still-warm iPad, when my friend approached and asked how bad the line was for them at the Apple store.

"No line at all," was the response, and well, I don't guess I have to tell you that my buddy Mike still doesn't have a juicer.

But he does have an iPad.

And he also has a Sprint Hotspot card, which means we all spent the better part of Sunday surfing with the iPad in a restaurant, at his house, and of course, while traveling well above the speed limit on the 405 (yay for high-speed iPad twittering).

Friends, I was prepared to pooh-pooh the Pad.

No camera (so no Skype), no Flash no 3G. "Too big to be small and too small to be big," said I, in general useless except as a toy, and of course the still-true-of-Apple rule "never buy the first iteration; it's only half-baked" - all of which vanished as soon as I held it and started messing with it.

The truth is that even in its infancy, this thing is mind-rippingly awesome.

Dumb iPhone apps I love (Koi Pond and that goddamned Bejeweled game) are downright thrilling at twice their size. And sorry, Kindle, but reading on this thing is just fantastic.

The size is perfect (smaller than I expected, so it really will fit in even a smallish handbag) and the image quality is surprisingly high-def. Watching movies or tv shows on this is a dream.

The clincher? How about being able to use That Squeezy Thing on the MAP app, having the map in a size you can actually SEE instead of squinting at your phone and swearing?

Dammit. Looks like they just sold me an iPad....

(well, maybe one of the third iterations)