iPad Update

I've had an iPad for a couple of weeks now and it's been interesting. It's a bit early to say how it's going to evolve. It's become the "thing I carry around all day". I love being in a meeting with it (once we're past the "ooh, an iPad" bit) because I can have all the papers in it (and other relevant documents) and have shed the whole business of printing and filing documents - I'm almost entirely paperless now. When I'm on the hoof, it's much better than a smartphone for email, which means I get to reply to lots of these in odd moments. I'm very attached to Evernote and this is great on the iPad. Right now, I have a laptop, smartphone and iPad.

This is overkill, but I'm allowing myself the luxury of figuring out what's best for what and how the iPad fits into the ecosystem. With time, I can see many busy people moving to a desktop/iPad/dumbphone setup.

Not everyone is going to go for this, but I find I can read books on it. In cold financial terms, it pays for itself in around two years if I don't print papers for meetings.

My team have another reason to have a few of these around - lots of our students are going to have them and while I'm not going to instigate a big project to make everything work in iPad, we're including it in the list of platforms we check new and updated things on.

...and oh, yes - I love it!

Out with the M2400, in with the MacBook Pro

Well, I finally gave up with the M2400. The hardware was pretty much OK, but I made the fatal mistake of borrowing a MacBook for a week (and then two weeks and then a bit longer until I finally had to give it back).

I now have a Unibody Macbook Pro 15". It sleeps, it wakes up. Mac applications are beautiful and work together beautifully. I'm stuck with running Vista in VMware Fusion for this and that for our corporate applications, but don't think I'll every go back.

Oh yes, and I also have an iPhone 3GS, which connects to the MacBook in cunning ways.