I’m an early adopter. I’ve been an early adopter since before I was the only girl in my dorm with a computer. I love technology and gadgets and cool geeky toys. I have my iPhone 3G, my PS3, my Roku, and my Kindle. There’s some functional overlap that’s happened over time. My Roku eliminated my cable TV use entirely and now, my PS3 offers the streaming Netflix functionality that drove my Roku purchase. I’ll keep them both because there’s always going to be more than one room in the house and you never know what kind of cool content Roku might offer next.
So, enter the iPad. It’s shiny, right? It’s a giant shiny gadget calling out to me and my insatiable geekery. But y’know what? Not seeing it. If I were a college/grad student and all my text books could go on the thing complete with graphics, maybe. But even then, the inability to multi-task is really capping my enthusiasm at lukewarm. No multi-tasking, no Flash, no HDMI, no widescreen movies, no webcam, no cam at all, and an additional $30/mo bill for me to have access to the web on the fly? No.
I can get on-the-go multimedia on my iPhone, which is also, shockingly, a phone. I’m already paying for it and adding a dataplan for the added functionality makes sense. My Kindle offers me instant gratification but doesn’t make me pay for it. Granted, it’s black and white at the moment, but that covers 99.9% of the books I read. My Kindle, which isn’t the DX, fits in my purse nicely – a not large purse. It is similar in size to a paperback. I’m not going to start carrying a bigger bag just to fit an iPad, which I can only use periodically whilst out and overlaps the functionality of my iPhone which I purchased from you previously. Carrying and paying for both monthly seems silly. And it certainly isn’t like the iPad can replace my MacBook Pro. I can’t very well play WoW on the iPad, can I?
Unless there are some developments between now and release, I won’t be in line and I won’t be buying one in the near future. I’m an Apple fan, don’t get me wrong, but either I’m not the target audience for this particular product (while I am for the vast majority of their products) or they missed the boat a tad on this one. Bummer, that.
Oh also, my wedding dress came in! This is unrelated, but more exciting for me than the tepid iPad news.
