Well, I got an iPad yesterday despite my loathing of iTunes.

So far it is pretty decent. I wanted an easy way to read PDFs around the house, as comfortable as I can be reading a hardcopy manual. The laptop was out as too unwiedly, the iPod Touch was out as being just a pain to try to read full manuals with it. The iPad feels like it will be perfect for that.

It is a lot faster than the Touch. It is able to render the full website of the sites I checked yesterday (NHL, Second City Hockey), and ridiculously quicker, which was an awesome improvement over the iPod Touch.

I ran into a few things that I didn't like yesterday. First was syncing. There is a known issue, to everybody but me apparently. For some reason iTunes thought I synced an iPad in Aug 09. That caught me off guard. However, it seemed to transfer my paid for apps and music (I only tried with a couple CDs worth) without a problem. It will be fun to see if it pukes and tries to delete them off my iPod Touch next time I sync it (I have four new CDs that I need to transfer over).

One was an issue with the WiFi. I don't know if it was a problem with my router or with the iPad. I didn't have any problems when I was originally setting it up and downloading some things I needed (some straight from the App Store). A little while later, the iPad somehow got disconnected while not being moved from the spot where it was happily downloading stuff earlier) and refused to reconnect. My work laptop was the only other wireless connection and it didn't lose connection or even have a hiccup during this time. I ended up having to reboot the router before the iPad would talk to it again. Once I did that, I was able to use the iPad around the house and it did not get disconnected again.

Finally, the browser. I would refresh a forum (Second City Hockey) and inexplicably while scrolling down occasionally (more often than not), Safari would puke and reload the page, sending me to the top again. At first I thought I was killing it by scrolling down past where it loaded (those forums get a lot of traffic during games). However, a few times it happened while I was scrolling through rendered areas and the downloading looked like it was finished. The page doesn't autorefresh, so I don't know what was causing it. One of my friends said she sees that quite a bit, usually on forums. I never saw that before, she uses Macs though, so no telling if it is a Safari issue or what. It was obnoxious having to rescroll through all few hundred replies to get to the bottom every time that happened.

One thing that has me excited is supposedly the NHL is working on getting GameCenter working on the iPad. That would be awesome for watching games when I'm on the road (which looks to be the majority of Jan-Mar of next year) and away from my TV.

Overall, I'm really happy with it so far. I think it would be fun to dork around with the SDK, but I can't really see buying a new machine just for that. That is subject to change, I guess.