I have an iPad in my hands, and I want to write down what it feels like before the novelty wears off and I forget.
It was hyped enormously, and here is the strange part. It mostly deserved it. Not because it does anything a computer cannot do, but because of how it does it. The machine disappears. There is no cursor standing between you and the thing. You touch the thing itself.
The first feeling I had was about paper. I have spent five years in print, and I love it, and I still felt a jolt at the idea of a stack of documents becoming weightless. I have not resolved how I feel about that. I want to use less paper and I love paper, both at once, and I suspect I always will.
What the iPad really changes is the question. On a phone we ask what is the one thing this person came to do, because there is no room for two. On a desktop we barely ask anything at all, because there is room for everything and so we put everything. The tablet sits between the two and refuses both answers. It has room, and it has intimacy, and it will not let you be lazy with either.
Not many people are using them yet. The world has not decided. And the App Store is still a hard and particular gate, which means the tablet's fate is not entirely in the hands of the people designing for it.
Still, I have held it, and something in me has already moved. It is a lean-back device that you reach out and touch, which ought to be a contradiction and somehow is not. I do not know yet what it is for. I only know I would like to be one of the people who finds out.