So am I attracted to the iPad?

With the incredible amount of hype around "that thing Apple will announce soon", whatever they did was just never going to match it. People I think expected something amazing and revolutionary, which I suspect Apple also quite like to play their product as. I'd describe it more as an evolution - a kind of next step from what they've had before.

At first glance, it felt to me like they'd essentially taken the iPod Touch and super-sized it. The iPod Touch is perhaps the nicest tech product I've ever owned. It started off for me as a really quite nice web browsing device that I could easily take anywhere with me, and it also provided a good way to listen to music. With the app store, it's become one of the key tools I use for language learning. But does a bigger device help or hinder me? (Oh my, I may have just got this flagged as spam...)

For web browsing, it's for sure that the extra space would be nice. I do, sometimes, sit on the sofa and surf the web on my iPod Touch, but after a while the small screen gets a bit too cramped. I'd really quite like to do more of my non-work, casual surfing away from my desktop, but it happens rarely because laptop = worst posture than the desktop and iPod Touch = awkward for extended browsing session, even if it's an excellent web browsing experience for a device of that size.

For music it makes no difference at all to have this over an iPod Touch and I very much doubt I'd use it to listen to music unless I was using it for something else anyway.

For apps - this will be interesting. Watching the video demonstration of the email app that will come with the device - everything done by touch - I have to say that it looked like a good user experience. Apple seem to be really pioneering touch and multi-touch interface, and as someone who did once suffer a bit from - and still gets aches now and then due to - repetitive strain injury, time using alternative input methods to do stuff is appealing. I doubt typing a lot on the device will really fly, so I can't see me really replying to emails on it, but reading my mail, tossing the stuff that doesn't matter, following mailing lists and so forth could easily be done without much typing. For the language learning stuff, just having things bigger will mean less eye strain, so I'd not complain about that.

The main issue with bigger is that it's then less portable. I have absolutely no qualms about carrying my iPod Touch and my laptop around with me. Carrying a laptop and an iPad? Hmm. No. Do Not Want. So in many ways, I expect if I had an iPad, it'd mostly stay at home, apart from on those occasions when I was going away and didn't need a laptop (e.g. pure vacation, not for conference) but could spare the space for taking something a bit bigger.

So anyway, cool bit of tech, look forward to playing with one, can imagine how I'd use it, but suspect it's going to be a luxury rather than a "must have".