Man, lemme tell you, I was a HUGE skeptic before I had one because it looked like a stupidly large iPhone. Once I got mine up and running I was blown away. It's a truly ingenious piece of technology. For my purposes, it's basically a really intuitive, highly portable, touch-screen computer with the capacity for FaceTime and other iPhone apps.
Just for the purposes of my work this thing can do the following list of tasks that I can't do as easily on my Macbook:
-take hand written notes and integrate images, voice, and text seamlessly, while ordering notes by subject.
-read and annotate PDF files downloaded to my iPad
-scan anything, annotate and save it
-read all my books from Kindle, iBooks, and other electronic-based book providers
-reduce the size of my workstation from an encyclopedia-sized machine to that of a large notecard (some of the keyboards for it are pretty good).
Plus I get a bunch of touch-screen functionality which is more intuitive by default, and a bunch of games.
Perhaps my favorite thing of all is the battery life. I can do business or leisure on the iPad over the course of several days of consistent use before my battery runs out, whereas my Macbook is dead in 4 hours or less.
Let us know how you like it man! I pulled one of my students who is an evangelist for this thing over after class and had him walk me through the academically oriented stuff you can do with it. I'd suggest having a friend give you the run down if you're anything like me, 'cause I had no idea about the raw power the iPad has and the scope of things you can do with it.
I feel old just saying that--I didn't use email 'till my 20s

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