SO - first impressions...well, as always with Apple products - its nicely packaged. Box contains only the iPad, a synch cable and a power adapter. It arrived charged, cool...but on first power up it had to be connected to a PC or Mac with iTunes - that was kind of a pain. I would have liked it to be all 'self contained', allowing registration through iTunes on the unit itself.

As soon as I brought up iTunes, it begged for an update...once complete, I connected my iPad and was walked through registration. It immediately started to copy 2 of every song in my library to the iPad (OUCH!). Apparently either during the iTunes update or during the first scan when the iPad was connected, iTunes added my backup music folder to my music library in spite of the fact that the music duplicated what was already in my library. ( I buy all my music on CD and rip to mp3...then add to iTunes which apparently leaves me with multiple copies of everything.) At that point I turned off automatic synching for music and killed everything already copied to the iPad and once again killed all the dupes from iTunes. Fine, I'll worry about music later - I just dragged a couple albums over for now.

Next up, apps...I decided to synch with the apps already loaded for my Touch - that was a mistake! I really only wanted a couple of them but that was easy enough and I got to try them on the iPad. I killed all but Bump, iBird Pro, Fluid, Trace and IM+. They all seem to work but Trace was awesome on iPad - great game and looks great when you 2x it to fill the screen. I also downloaded Keynote, Pages and Scrabble. Keynote and Pages are cool but I ended up with the wrong version of scrabble - thanks to the App store poor design and failure to properly separate iPad and iPod apps...yes it works and was cheaper but it isn't what I wanted. My main issues with the iPad were not the unit itself but the iTunes Stores - really don't like them for music or apps. I am now used to the Zune store for music and iTunes just looks like a mess and it's hard to find anything comparatively. The App store does not let you set your view to just iPad or just free which makes browsing the App store kind of useless to me.

Anyway the iPad itself - the standout was the way it handles photos. The design is very intuitive and everything loads quickly. I love being able to 'peek' into a folder to see what's there. I love the whole idea of using my iPad as a digital photo frame when I'm not active using it.

The book reader is well designed but I will stick with my Kindle for that - the iPad is a bit too heavy for me to hold for long periods of time. I have some arthritis in my left thumb and after 30 minutes or so of holding the iPad it started to make those horrible crunching sounds (you'll know what I mean if you have arthritis..) and started to really hurt. Even without the arthritis I think I would choose the Kindle - it's easier on the eyes and really is the perfect size and weight for reading plus the Kindle store completely blows away the iBook store - it is orders of magnitude better but unfortunately that does not hold true for the kindle store as accessed through the iPad Kindle app.

Browsing on the iPad really does rock..do I miss Flash - in a word NO. It all depends on whether you are a heavy user of Flash sites...for example - Facebook looks great but if you want to play one of those Zynga games (Farmville, Fishville, Cafe World..etc) it doesn't work.

Despite the fact that I noted some negatives above - the iPad looks and feels great in your hands. The screen is bright and clear and browsing on it is amazing. The interface is fairly good though it could use a few tweaks. Performance is snappy and I really enjoyed the time I spent on it.

That's all for now..