Tried out an iPad this afternoon. It's a slick little device, very nice looking for games. Some people have commented on iPhone apps looking ugly on the larger screen; it seemed to me that the demo games weren't noticeably pixelated, but maybe that's why they're demos.
The astronomy app had a much nicer interface than Google Sky and I could easily imagine carrying the small device outside for a few hours at night.
They're not trying very hard to sell it to me, though. I wanted to see how well the drawing apps worked -- Sketchbook Pro would be ideal, but I'd settle for trying the feel of any of them. Not a single demo unit in the store had a drawing app on it. Also, weirdly, iBooks wasn't working on the demo units.
The blog looked fine -- welcome all you iPad-enabled readers -- although I can see that a two-column format would be better than three on that size display. I'll have to think about that moving forward. The trend in the early-2000's was always toward bigger and bigger layouts, but now we have to think about mobile devices.
Sophie would very willingly have carried one right out the door. It may be the perfect computing device for 9-year-old girls. Goodwin, on the other hand, was not all that interested. Even the car racing game didn't grab him.
