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Generally, a software keyboard is incredibly inferior to a real tangible keyboard. You soon realize that you normally rest your fingers on the keys and use the tactile feedback to adjust the finger position, allowing you to keep eyes on the screen and still type fast with no errors. On a software keyboard you have to hover your fingers in the air over the keys which not only results in more errors but also creates muscle strains. You also have no place to rest your hands. This is a serious issue since so many people get long-term disabled by inflammation due to strained muscles when using keyboards and mouse; it's simply not ergonomic. To compensate for the missing feel of the keyboard you also spend a lot of time looking where you type. But your hands cover the keys, you can see what you hit easily.

Using the keyboard in "landscape" mode is close to impossible. In the couch you bend your legs to support the iPad in a good angle, but it slides down your lap. So either you will look like you are playing with yourself in the groin or you will have to use your thumbs to support it.

So, you turn it into "portrait" mode and hold it with both hands on the sides and type with your thumbs - like on the iPhone. This works well... but it works much better on the iPhone in landscape mode where the distances across the keyboard are just fine for what your thumbs can comfortably reach.

You can use external keyboards. I tried with a regular wireless mac keyboard and it worked just fine. You will have to find an external aid to hold your iPad in the right angle so you can see the screen. You begin to wonder why you didn't bring the laptop along. I haven't tried the keyboard accessory but that might save the day. I heard it was a bit flimsy.

Upperclass ladies change dresses many times a day. One for the winter garden coffee, one for shopping, an evening dress. Nerds does the same. We work on our laptops during the day, check email in the metro on the iPhone and end the day in the couch surfing the web on the iPad. If these activities were all separate there would be no problem. They are not. We want to check email, read and annotate PDFs, write notes and do this across applications efficiently. The only tool that does this currently is the laptop (or netbook!). The iPhone doesn't, but has so far been excused because we simply don't expect it from such a small device. So on the iPhone we read the email but rarely care to process it if it involves multiple steps into other applications. The iPhone works well for checking email, why would I need a bigger device to do the same?

So basically we need efficient multitasking. But even if the iPad did that, we would still need a common filesystem that all applications could access and that filesystem had to be sync'ed with the laptop and iPhone. What we would need is that all applications could read and write to something like DropBox.

So; we need multitasking (and will have it soon). But we also need effective file sync'ing with laptop and iPhone. And even then, I'm not sure the iPad will ever be efficient enough since one reason my laptop is such a great tool is that I can place more applications in the same screen view and that in itself is a sort of integration.

Pages is slow. I imported a two column document with say 10 pages and a number of pasted graphics. Pages was unusable.

Keynote has a lot of problems too like Pages. You can't use custom fonts generally. So you won't like to do presentations with it since your corporate font choice is not supported. If you do presentations, you will not have presenter notes for some sick reason - which would be an obvious feature since the iPad only supports a dual-screen presentation mode.

Personally I was disappointed to find, that Apple removed the ability to annotate slides. There exist youtube videos from January showing how you could draw on slides in different colors. This was a selling point for me because I knew how useful that would be in a teaching situation. I admit that Apple never promised it, but still I wonder why they decided to remove this feature - the one thing that would set Keynote on iPad apart from the laptop version!

I think this is a general problem with tablets: They will never be good handwriting devices! First of all, for regular text input, a keyboard will always be far superior to writing with a pen, even on paper. Secondly, my experience is that to make things clear, you have to write jumbosize letters on a tablet 4 times the size of what you would do on paper. I tried with finger, and I tried with a Pogo stylus. And it's always uglier. On the iPad you even have the problem that the "pen" will not hit exactly the spot you want on the screen, so even making a graph can be difficult. Yet, I believe that tablets in combination with the right application could be great for note taking, mixing text from keyboard, drawings on screen (think diagrams, illustrations and math fomulars) and photos from a camera with optical zoom. But what I would really like to see is something like a Livescribe Pulse Smartpen with a bluetooth instant transfer to my Macbook so paper notes drawn with real ink (diagrams, illustrations and math fomulars) would appear instantly as I draw and write them on my laptop inside my typed text. That would blow everything else away in terms of productive note taking.

The iPad is too heavy. You can't hold it for longer times in one hand. You have to hold tight not to loose it. You won't like to watch a movie on it because you get tired in your hands. Rie and I tried it. We rented a movie in the iTunes store (I have a US account) and after waiting one hour for the download (no, you cannot playback while it still downloads in the background like on the laptop!) we watched it. We had to take turns, "Honey, could you please support the iPad in this corner now, please change the angle a bit there" etc. Why didn't we rent it on the Laptop which can hold the screen itself?

The iPad misses a camera. But my preferable solution is a small camera with autofocus, optical zoom and lowlight capabilities which plugs into the dock connector. The reason is that the iPhone works just fine as a pocket camera for photos and video while the iPad camera makes sense in a meeting or at a conference where you wish to take a snapshot of a document, a powerpoint slide or flipchart far away and instantly integrate it into your note taking.

Of course, let us send SMS messages and even telephone from the device. It's more healthy to use headsets for telephony anyway.

In principle we would be better off by an open standard instead of Flash. But the fact is that you keep reaching for your laptop again and again when you enter a site that uses Flash for something interactive like buying a cinema ticket or planning travel. Why did Apple decide that I should not be able to enjoy this content? So it drains battery and memory, but why not let me choose?

What I really was looking forward to on the iPad is the ability to interact with a computer through gestures and being able to "draw" on the screen. For instance diagrams, formulas etc. And switch between this revolutionary input form and the old fashioned keyboard and mouse. What I would like to see is a Macbook with a touch screen with gestures iPad style. Another option would be if the iPad had a dock connector on the long side, imagine if you have a keyboard made just like a laptop but instead of the screen you had rails your could slide the iPad into. And then you would fill the keyboard base with a huge battery. Then you could just take the iPad out of the keyboard and look funky but also get to work anytime with the keyboard. And the whole pack would still be physically as small as a netbook.