Yes I Did It and It Feels Great (and Productive)

Saturday afternoon. Ramona is asleep taking her afternoon nap. Me? I got tons to do but am sitting on the sofa playing with my iPad so I thought I would give Blogger (the platform my blog is hosted on) a try.

I unwrapped my iPad on wednesday taking the day off to enjoy my new toy and spend the day with the kid. I proceeded to do more YouTube watching of Elmo's song then anything else as my 8 month old is already asserting her control of the iPad as a toy that I will have to share with her. So be it, on my list of why I should get one was that she could play baby games on it.

I didn't rush out to buy the iPad - I actually did not buy it, my husband sick of hearing me talk about the pros and cons, if I should wait for the next version (primarily because of the camera) came home with it on Monday - there was no reason to return it once it was in the house. I am a lucky girl. I do like Apple products, our home computer is a Mac, I have an iTouch (which I won but probably would have bought) but work revolves around windows and blackberry and those are big parts of my digital life.

I am going to love my iPad for personal use, consuming content from browsing the web, reading books, playing games, watching videos, etc. But straight away i feel that this is a great tool for work as well. I have only had my iPad for 4 days, but I have already used it at two client meetings and sketched an outline of a solution I am putting together for a client (using sketchbook pro app). One of the meetings i had to be on the 3G network in downtown San Francisco, which was slow as a turtle which was disappointing but expected. The other i displayed a presentation in PDF format that i had emailed myself and it worked fine. Keynote is one of my next Apps that i need to download.

Aside from being a good tool for client meetings it is important for me to know and understand consuming media on a device such as this because it will go beyond the iPad to other devices and this will happen quickly. Our customers are already starting to aggressively ask about iPad solutions (especially for the executive set who tend to be early adopters and important consumers of our content delivery solutions). Lucky for me, because of our alignment with the digital content side of our consumer business (the folks that brought us the WSJ iPad app) we already are a few steps ahead of the game in delivering.

A recent Wall Street Journal article 'Businesses Add iPads to Their Briefcases' on how
"Some Companies, Which Barred the iPhone, Build Apps for Tablet Computer and Give Apple Gadget to Employees" points into the direction this will be going, hopefully i didn't jump the gun too early and miss the handing out of iPads by corporate? (ok ok i would just have two :-)

Note: I had to jump on my computer to do some of the links, Blogger works but it could either be my inexperience with the iPad (e.g. copy and paste), or it is just not not optimized which i reckon will be the case with many sites and services on the web that do not have native Apps. i am ok with that.