The iPad: Will it change your life?

“It doesn’t cure cancer, turn water into wine, or even take the dog for a walk,” said Jonathan Takiff in the Philadelphia Daily News. Still, fans of Apple’s new iPad are predicting it will have a revolutionary impact, changing the way people consume books, newspapers, and magazines, and bringing high-definition movies, videos, and TV shows to a portable, right-sized screen. Count me among the converted, said Farhad Manjoo in Slate.com. The thin, flat, 1.5-pound wonder unveiled by Apple founder Steve Jobs last week is a “perfect hybrid” of laptop and smart phone. It will enable people to cruise the Internet and read e-mail on a relatively large, almost magical touch screen. It runs for 10 hours without having to be recharged. Best of all, it’s a huge upgrade on Amazon’s Kindle, providing a more intimate, full-color alternative in which the user sees two pages at a time, with a crease down the middle. Readers can turn pages instantaneously with a flick of their fingers.

“The iPad is undeniably cool,” said Nancy Dillon in the New York Daily News. But “it’s hard to see where it will fit in.” With a 9.7-inch screen, it can’t match the convenience of your pocket-sized smart phone. Yet it’s not powerful enough to replace your laptop. The iPad is yet another “device I never knew I needed.” Calling this thing “the Moses tablet,” as many already are, is a vast exaggeration, said Troy Wolverton in the San Jose Mercury News. The iPad has no digital camera, so you can’t use it for video calls. It doesn’t multitask, so you can’t surf the Web while checking e-mail. It can’t run applications that Apple hasn’t approved. Oh, yes—it’s also tied to the wheezing, overloaded AT&T data network. Fortunately, Version 2.0 is undoubtedly on its way. So I’ll probably buy an iPad. “Just not yet.”

Sooner or later, we’ll all own an iPad or something like it, said Nicholas Carr in The New Republic Online. Tablet devices like the iPad are the wave of the future, destined to make your PC obsolete. Today, most people want their computers to connect to the vast databases of the Internet—what geeks call “the cloud’’—whenever they want and wherever they are. The iPad, for all its imperfections, has made that movement inexorable. “Whether it finds mainstream success or not, there’s no going back.”

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