[LINK] iPad

[Fred Pilcher]

I'm no lover or Apple and their corporate philosophy ("we pwn you"), 
though I can't but admit that what they do, they do well. Evil, but 
well. The only Apple device I own (or that owns me) is an iPod which I 
got as a door prize at a conference and for which I have to run Windows 
and iTunes (was there ever a greater abomination?)

The thing that's always puzzled me about their tablet is what the hell 
you'd do with it. Tablets have been around for years and I've never seen 
a single one in the wild. So even assuming that Apple do it well, 
outside some very specialised applications it seems like a solution in 
search of a problem.

But then a workmate who's very vision-impaired told me yesterday that he 
can't wait to get one. Books are virtually inaccessible to him these 
days. Work bought him an iPhone, which he can use but which is much too 
small for him to read anything other than icons. He can read books on 
his PC, but he can't sit in the Comfy Chair with a computer to read a 
book comfortably, or take it to bed to read. The iPad, though, might be 
just the thing. If it has handwriting recognition he could take it to 
meetings with documents and make notes on it.

So there seems to be at least one practical use for it.

Fred