One in a million....iPads

Yup, I was in Chicago last week and managed to get my sticky paws on just one of the million iPads Steve Jobs announced he'd sold in just 28 days.  Apparently it took 74 days to sell 1 million iPhones from when they launched in July 2008.

So here's the picture to date:  1 market only (USA), WiFi only model, 1 million units, 12k apps downloaded from the 5k now available and 1.5k eBooks downloaded.

Quirkily, the free iBook the iBook app came with was AA Milne's Winnie the Pooh :-)

Ok, ok, I have to admit that it's not exactly mine, but bought for the office, but just for context, that meant I had this many options of internet connectivity and search / entertainment possibility to hand on Monday night.

And that's with my netbook out on loan at the minute. Too many devices, not enough hands, needs or eyes!

Full marks as ever to Apple for making the purchase process pleasurable. I logged in to the Apple concierge site, reserved my iPad, received a confirmation email and subsequently this notification that it was ready and waiting for me. Nice touch. (Forgive the pun).

The dude in the store was amazing, set it all up, gave me some cunning work around tips as obviously the iPad Appstore is currently only available to US users, and was genuinely passionate about the product, and the fact that I bought the USB and SD card adapter widget (separate, grrrrr). It was the first time they'd had them in stock / seen them at work. So enthusiastic was he that a pile of his colleagues appeared to check it out too. All adding up to a great purchase experience from reservation to leaving the store, new toy in hand and ready to play with as soon as I got to the airport.

So first impressions?

I'm not going to waver from my original position that it's primarily a coffee table device.

A damn sexy one, and you can't argue with the fabulous-ness of the touch interface on the bigger, more gratifying scale of the iPad over the iPhone or iTouch, but... it's a big, expensive, digital photo frame with lots of extra functionality.

Do I  love it? Absolutely!

For me, I need some work horse computing capability, and this isn't it, unless I'd gone to the lengths of buying the keyboard and stand-y thing or a separate bluetooth keyboard, it's not a device that would be comfy or practical for writing long emails, documents or blog posts on, but as an always to hand, totally capable of dealing with many internet requirements (let's not totally overlook the Flash / HTML5 war) device, it's perfect. Which goes back to the points I've previously made, if I was a primarily leisure user, was more style over price conscious and didn't already have a heap of other options, it's a serious contender.

I haven't had it for long enough to play with the more "work" related apps like Keynote (i.e Powerpoint) with the touch interface but watch this space....