Day One with the Smudgetastic Magic Slate

Here's day one of practical usage with the world's most expensive Etch-a-Sketch. First impressions:

It will take a while to get used to typing on this screen. I don't have l;rage hands but it sdyill feelsa bit like typing wiht oven mitts. But I thought typing on the iphone would be peculiar, and somehow managed to adjust.

The screen is great, but it smudges easily. This is easily remedied by not touching the screen. Granted, you can't use the machine, but just knowing you possess one is enough.

I wish it had a camera, because then you could prop it up on the bathroom counter and use it as a mirror for shaving. But, you ask, don't you have a big bathroom mirror? At face-level, too? Dude: yes. Of course. But using computers to help you shave is automatically cooler. There will soon be an app that shows which spots I've missed.

So then: is it a replacement for an actual computer one might carry around? Yes and no. Depends on what you do, of course; if you edit video or pictures or any other sort of content-generation job, you will not be happy with an iPad. But that's like being angry at a cookbook because it doesn't come with ginzu knives and a pound of raw tuna. The point of the iPad is consumption, not creation. You can write, of course, and the Numbers and Keynote apps allow some business-type work, but no one's going to buy the iPad right now to make spreadsheets.

Didn't load any music on it, because that's an iPod's job. Movies? Not yet; need something I haven't seen. Added the Netflix app, which allows streaming of anything I've added to my account. But since this is a workday, I won't be watching anything.

Apps: loaded Instapaper, which lets you save pages for offline reading, because I didn't get the 3G version and will have to rely on wireless for connectivity. Again, this is like expecting a Viewmaster to pick up TV signals. I don't expect this device to need connectivity all the time. If I wanted it, I'd pay for it, but I don't want another monthly subscription charge for anything. At all. Ever again.

I loaded some photos on it. I don't need to have a device with lots of photos, but I expect I'll be showing it off, and so this means you have to have some dog-and-daughter albums. It takes a while to choose, but only seconds to sync. No drag-and-drop into iPhoto. There isn't any iPhoto. You can't open folders. There aren't any folders. There's no operating system you can see or tweak. That's the main reason it'll never be my primary computer, because I like instant access to the way I've structured and stored my information, thank you very much. If I want to save a piece in a folder specifically designed to hold things written on rainy Tuesdays in months not beginning with J or D, that's my right. So it's not a computer for work.

This is what people are talking about when they say it's a New Paradigm. We laughed when Apple got rid of the floppy, right? But no one uses floppy discs now. It can be annoying, this paternalism - we don't like floppies anymore, so you can't have them - but it's not like someone doesn't come up with a workaround right away. (I had three floppy drive replacements, including an Imation SuperDisk and an Iomega drive; they're all useless now) Future versions may have access to a desktop, and if so we don't be talking about new paradigms anymore, but a new era of Ease and Flexibility. And I'll be right there, slinging the new conventional wisdom!

It's not that I think this changes the world, but it does make computing simpler for most people. Because most people don't want files and folders and desktops; they just want to do things. Tablets make that easy: look, point, get. It's caveman-simple.