How the iPad won over a true skeptic

NEW YORK - At first glance, the iPad looked like a heavy, overgrown iPod Touch. After just a few months of use, however, this iPad skeptic realized that it's so much more - it's one of those devices I've always needed. Those don't come around very often.

Most things get less interesting the more examples you see of them. If you've never seen a computer before, the first one is a revelation, but each successive model gets less and less remarkable.

Apple Inc.'s iPad is the other way around. It looks more impressive in light of what's come before it. I've seen many tablet computers of different stripes since 2002, when Microsoft introduced Windows XP Tablet Edition. The quality has varied, but they've all been failures, even the recent ones. They're a Stonehenge's worth of near-useless slabs.

The iPad finally fulfills the promise of the tablet computer when it came out in April.

It cuts the mouse and keyboard out of the equation, giving us a straight, tactile connection. While the iPad builds on the iPhone, it feels like a bigger achievement. The first iPhone was a great phone, driven by far-thinking new ideas. But other people had made good phones before. Before the iPad, no one had made a good tablet computer. Even Apple failed with its first attempt, the Newton, back in the '90s.

When I first got my hands on an iPad for a review, I played games on it for about a month. My favorite strategy game, "Battle for Wesnoth," was written for the PC, but actually works better on the iPad, thanks to the immediacy of the touch interface. Several other games conspired to suck away my productivity, so it took me a while to realize that the iPad actually fulfills a longtime tablet vision as well: It's like a sheet of paper, electronified. That's what made me plunk down $499 for one of my own once I was done with the borrowed review unit.

I knew I was waiting for a device that could replace printouts, magazines, newspapers and books in my life. At first, I didn't think the iPad was it, because it's too heavy to hold comfortably in one hand. In particular, I need one hand free to steady myself on the New York subway. Better, I thought, to wait for a smaller device, something with a screen that measures 5 to 7 inches diagonally instead of the iPad's 9.7 inches.

I was wrong. The iPad isn't too heavy if I support it on a bag when standing. And the screen is just big and sharp enough to display decently a letter-sized document or a reformatted newspaper page with teasers for a couple of articles.

That means the last defenses that kept dead trees relevant to me have been overcome. I canceled the print subscription for one of my newspapers and went electronic. I've also started stuffing papers I want to have with me through a sheet-fed scanner and moved the resulting files to the iPad as PDFs. It's like ripping CDs to get MP3s; the iPad is like an iPod for paper.

Replacing paper was the rationale of Amazon.com Inc.'s Kindle e-reader, but the multipurpose iPad beats it at its own game. The Kindle was revolutionary in its way because it could download books wirelessly, but it has been held back by a s

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