The iPad 2 – I'm In Geek Heaven!

Okay, I've been a terrible slacker lately about my blog, and I'm going to start kicking it back into gear! There's a lot of stuff I could say, but I first wanted to give a big shout out about the new iPad 2′s that we got (one for my wife, Jan, for her birthday, and one for me to replace my netbook). I also got Apple's little bluetooth keyboard to go with it for more heavy-duty typing: the on-screen touch keypad is okay for tweets and such but when I'm trying to crank out 500 to 1000 words an hour, I need a "real" keyboard. And both the iPad and the keyboard slip into my bag with plenty of room to spare.

I'm not going to try and do a big techie review, as I'm sure there are plenty of folks out there doing that. I just wanted to say that the iPad 2 is just plain, freakin' cool. I have Pages on it (which is Apple's word processor), and I can sync my latest book project between the iPad and my MacBook Pro as necessary, even using the iDisk on MobileMe (if that's all greek to you, don't worry: it's just a neat way to share files between devices).

There are also some other really cool apps for the iPad. The one that I like the most (of the relatively few I've played around with so far) is Flipbook. Just that one silly app totally transformed the experience of "reading" Twitter and, more importantly, some of the blogs that I really should follow and read, but haven't bothered with. Flipbook makes it incredibly easy and visually intuitive. Just plain cool. And there are a bazillion other apps out there to choose from.

I'm still waiting on my case to arrive, so I'll let you know how that goes when it gets here. That's the one thing I don't like about the iPad so far: it's a bit awkward (and a tad heavy) to hold without a case. But other than that, I'm really liking it so far!