iPads appeared in Canada today. Last month, I was at Drupalcon in San Francisco and all the cool kids had iPads. They were enviable for more than the cool factor: they have VERY long battery lives (upwards of 10 hrs.). The display is crisp. Landscape or portrait is up to you depending on which way you hold it. With laptops, you have to be nomadic: travel and squat. With the iPad, you can cradle it like a steno pad. If they had a camera so that you could see where you were going, you could nestle the iPad between you and reality as you walked down the street.
I was next door to a Future Shop today. I decided to pop in and see if any were being demonstrated. They had models ranging from the 16GB for $549 to the 64GB for close to $800. The basic model had solely wifi, the top end could run with 3G or wifi. The downside of the 3G option is that it needs to be coupled with a data plan from a cellphone company. Given that Canada's data plans are notoriously lousy, I think the upper end iPads are a gateway drug.
I tried out a few sites. The iPad did very well with Youtube and Vimeo videos. Because of the Apple fear of the right-click, I couldn't find a way to right click those pages and see if they were running under HTML5 (I presume. Am I right?) or that there was a truce between Apple and Adobe.
With such a rush on the iPads, Future Shop was out of stock on almost all of the units except for some of the high end ones. I have some ideas where you can get yours. Even though Amazon is keen to push their Kindles, they do have at least one Apple iPad
At least Victoria has a few places to repair tablets and cellphones.
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