After watching the iPad demo yesterday I was going back and fourth yes/no/maybe about getting one. In the end I’ll probably go with the low end version because I can, and I want something mobile to read pdfs, but as a tool to publish I don’t think it’s there. Their whole book publishing/reading metaphor is disappointing. There’s no reason to simulate paper books on a new tool. And for creating content with an iPad it’s really hard to predict without having one in my hands, but my experience so far with the iPhone is that it’s great for a lot of things but not long posts. The keyboard dock looks painfully old and makes me wonder if Jonathan Ives has ever blogged in his life at a conference? Again I haven’t even tried one of these things yet but it looks like the whole could have come out five years ago. I also understand how product development works, that they need to actually ship something worthy and iterate after that but maybe invest some time in unique metaphors as opposed to giving us a “what we know is best” dumbed down paper page.

Everyone has an opinion about the iPad online and it’s impossible to even try to read them all. However with that said there’s a couple unique points that I haven’t seen a lot of that are worth noting. While I was left disappointed with the NYT demo on the iPad (it didn’t seem to take advantage of being mobile), PSFK’s reaction to how they might change their publishing was interesting. Daring Fireball making a connection with speed as he’s actually held and used one is worth reading too. The fact that Apple controls their chip is a huge advantage. And there’s Nina’s window’s UI metaphor response taking into her account of using the iPhone to read content.