Shiny, Shiny.

My friend J. just stopped in my office with a beautiful new iPad and let me monkey around with it for ten minutes or so. It is as amazing as you may have heard. It’s so amazing, in fact, that I want one desperately, although I can’t afford it and don’t really need it. I’d buy it in a heartbeat if I was doing a lot of traveling. Apple is going to sell a million of these things.

At some point I’ll need to buy one so that I can design for it. Right now, there are other important things to spend money on.

Ooooh – it’s great having your Mac Geek opinion on this issue!

I’m starting to seriously consider ditching my Pismo replacement plans and opting for an iPad as storing and even editing in Google docs continues to improve. For that matter, there will undoubtedly be a workable Documents To Go-type app (if there isn’t one already) to get me by word processing- and spreadsheet-wise.

Whatcha think?

I would heartily endorse this plan, but you must first take this review into consideration.

The short version: If you want to write a new document, save it, and email it to your work/desktop computer, you can do that quite easily. The onscreen keyboard is perfectly serviceable (I was using it with no problems in my test drive), and you can also buy a $70 keyboard to go along with the iPad.

Syncing documents is a pain in the ass, and if you don’t have a Mac to sync to, forget it. The writing app (Pages) is a functional text editor but not a full-featured word processor, so you can certainly create documents but don’t expect you’ll be doing mail merges.

As for using Google Docs, I’d imagine you could do that pretty easily, but go hold an iPad and judge the size of the screen for yourself first.

Yikes – thanks for sharing that link. It sounds like at least for the time being I’ll be sticking with Google docs. I’m cool with that option – the price is right.

Thanks as always for your insight!