This year I had a big birthday in August and it was time to decide what to get. I would have loved the new Sony VAIO Z series as an update to my current laptop but it's very expensive and in the current environment it's hard to justify a spend like that. So instead I got the Apple iPad and I must say it is a great little machine. Everyone in the house gets great use out of it not just myself. It's so handy for getting on the net, for those times when you couldn't be bother to start up a laptop and wait for it to load and login you've nearly forgotten what it was you wanted to look up. Whereas you can just put your hand on the iPad and you're ready instananeously to start browsing. The only thing that annoys me though is that Apple won't run Flash, I just hate it when you pick it up to check something and then disciover you can't see it if it's a flash website.
There are so many good apps you can get and they are all reasonably priced and the graphics on some of these are amazing. Also it is so easy to get an app, you can search for it, download it and have it up and running in minutes. There are some great reference apps, like google maps, news apps, receipes, travel etc. Great games and even very good productivitity apps like email, word processing, spreadsheets and presentations. Although I haven't done it yet but being able to rent or buy a movie and see it on the iPads lovely screen is also a great application. I'll probably do this for the kids when we are travelling abroad to keep them amused. A great app I got over the weekend is Remote by Apple which means you can use your iPad to control what songs play on your iTunes on your Mac or PC, next I just need to be able to wirelessly route the music to my hifi amp and I've seen just the hardware to do this from Arcam, the RDAC, a great bit of kit!
Overall the iPad is a great little machine much easier to read than the iPhone or iTouch, very portable, very versatile and beautifully designed. Another great device from Apple.