So I’ve gone over 24 hours without using my laptop, which, for me, is an incredibly long amount of time. My goal was to exclusively use the iPad for that period of time to better acquaint myself with it and provide more thoughts after yesterday’s initial impressions. Here are some additional thoughts:
- Media consumption on the device is great — big, bright screen with clear sound
- After using it for a day, it is still a good ways away from replacing my laptop due to the lack of multi-tasking support as I like to have Pandora playing, with Google Talk, Google Chrome, and Mozilla Thunderbird all open at the same time
- I miss the Smart Folders feature of Mozilla Thunderbird that allows me to see my different email accounts in one inbox, while still organizing mail with account-specific IMAP folders
- TweetDeck for the iPad is nice with the in-frame browser while in vertical display mode, but I can’t resize that browser window and clicking “View in Safari” doesn’t seem to work right now
- Google Reader is mostly broken on the iPad right (can’t click through to an article, can’t load more entries, can’t mark as read, etc)
- Pandora for iPad should add an in-frame browser to the app as a workaround until the iPad supports multi-tasking
- My almost-three-year-old son absolutely loves the device and can do the drawing app and Red Fish app all day long (it’ll be great for him on long car rides!)
- Battery life is excellent and more than doubles in usage length compared to any laptop I’ve had
I still give the iPad a thumbs up but would say it is only a 50% replacement for a laptop at this time. It really excels as a content consumption device and lacks as a content creation device.
David Cummings on Startups 
What do you think of it as a Kindle replacement? Backlit display still too much?
It is a mostly Kindle device replacement. It doesn’t work great outside in sunlight but everywhere else works well.