My iPad landed on Sunday 11 April and it has been my constant companion since then. Even non-tech people have probably read 2 or 3 iPad review articles by now so I will try to be brief on the items mentioned by many others. However, here are my top-line pros and cons:

Pro:

Browsing the internet with your fingers is staggeringly intuitive, fluid and fun. It is hard to describe but moving a webpage around with your fingers, pinching to zoom in on a photo and jabbing at links is the way the web really should be. As such just this basic but vital task instantly seems easier on the iPad.

Portability: it is a very good size - the screen is large enough to be clearly legible for book reading, web browsing and showing off photos. Yet the tablet is light and wieldy enough to be held in 1 hand, balanced on a knee on the sofa. The result is that one uses the iPad often even in situations where previously a laptop just wouldn't have been worth opening up and dealing with. Therefore, the internet is available more often to look up phone numbers, addresses, facts etc. It is a real enabler of every-day life.

The world of apps gives it huge expandability. From the clear journalism of the Bloomberg news page and the in-depth financial charts it offers to the ability to check TV listings in an easy-to-read grid or the beautiful simplicity of the built-in address book, it is a device that can become almost anything you want or need. The number of ways it can make your life both more productive & enjoyable are simply unbelievable as a result of the flexibility that this app platform provides. And as this 'eco-system' evolves it will only get more useful.

Con:

Pretty much the only major con comes about as a result of how many positives there are: it is such a good device that you come to want it to do everything that clunky laptop can do - and in many ways it could if only Apple would let it. But as it stands now the iPad will have to connect to a Mac or PC regularly to manage its music library (it cannot do such a simple thing as make playlists, for instance), or to move documents about (although here a great app like AirSharing HD really helps) or to print from.

Also a large number of iPad users will also have iPhones and it would be so neat if the iPad really could stand alone and act as the anchor library for the iPhone. That way it would be a core device and a laptop replacement.

In terms of negatives I should also state that it is a great shame that Apple has not made significant steps to integrate their "cloud" (i.e. online) services more fully with it. At least Mobile Me subscribers get push synchronisation of contacts, calendars, mail and Find my iPad but document sharing and backup is non-existent.

Perhaps they are waiting for their new server farm to come online but the opportunity to drag new music from your iTunes library out of the cloud would be wonderful as well as shared space for the output of your content creation.

But these are minor gripes over what it could be as opposed to what it is: the best device yet made for the consumption of the internet, films on the move and news (don't even get me started on the awesome ease with which you can create your own daily updated newspaper of just writers and subjects you are interested in - that'll be in another blog post!).