I finally got my 3G iPad last night and had a chance to play with it. I’ll spare you the usual observations except to confirm what others have said — it’s not exactly what I thought it was because it changes my expectations. My desktop computer is less interesting than ever, now relegated to work and World of Warcraft. All my communicating just moved.

I took it to work with me on my commute to see how the 3G stuff worked (and, to be honest, to make sure I get my money’s worth out of the data subscription by getting data) and now I “get” RSS feeds. My Google Reader just tripled its perceived value (okay here’s an app recommendation I wasn’t going to do: G-Whizz aggregates your Google stuff under one application and that’s pretty handy and its mail interface is far prettier than the mail app you get with the iPad). I now kinda “get” Twitter — having used only the web interface to it, it was sort of one-dimensional. Now I have multiple streams, one of which is people responding to me. It makes sense. It’s useful. It’s interesting.

My Reader has a new feature in its mobile form. Normally I can look and see what people I follow are reading and decide whether I want to add their interests to my list. That’s cool — whether or not a service is read by someone I follow is certainly an indirect metric of my likely interest in it. Now, however, because the device knows where I am and knows where everyone else is, there’s another indirect metric: I can read stuff that people near me — physically — are interested in.

It turns out that’s actually a lot less useful in guessing what I might like. But it’s nifty.

The message forums I read are, for the most part, pretty aggravating on the thing. Everything is too bloody tiny. I don’t have any trouble with the soft keyboard but clicking a single 6-point digit is a lot harder with my finger than with a mouse pointer. I never realized before now the strange and precise dexterity we’ve learned through the mouse. So, dear forum developers, that shit has to change. Mobile versions need to be different. Maybe the whole idea needs to be different. The only real success on this front is the Vanilla message forum system, which spends almost all its screen real-estate on a list of messages. Which is what I’m there for.

So last night I hardly touched the desktop machine (which means I didn’t get any layout done: point against) but I was not disconnected. I felt like my brain was still pretty much complete (because the net is part of my brain now) while away from it, which makes my back happier as well as my brain. That’s kind of nice but now movies are too slow — it’s hard to concentrate when my augmented brain is wondering where I’ve seen that actor before and how Scorcese got the lighting to do that and knowing I could find out easily enough. I think this is a kind of birthing pain. Some things are changing and so some comfortable facts are going to disappear.

Tonight I will have the chance to bring the device to the gaming table and I think my printer is going to be relieved. There’s a lot of printing when you’re playtesting in order to keep the rules at the table current with the writing and this little monster solves that pretty tidily. The skunkworks wiki, when in “print friendly” mode also happens to be very mobile friendly. And Dropbox is tightly integrated with my preferred PDF reader, GoodReader (another app plug!), so the playtest draft releases, which are in PDF only, are also handily available. So gamers in particular may be in for a treat — a lot of the failings of electronic books for gaming (and only for gaming — my Kindle still kicks this thing’s ass for paperback emulation) are addressed here. It’s fast, it’s legible, the graphics are pretty, the links work. It’s slick in this context.

I’ll test it in a meeting next, where I’d normally drag a laptop to take notes, send email, and manage the minutes. I expect good things. I expect an IT panic, though — this beast blows the central control mind-set of the IT department away. Attempts to control net behaviour and computer usage are demolished here. Let’s hope it’s for the better, because either way, we’re going to find out.

–BMurray