A nice pleasant surprise was the eBook reader.  My wife, who uses a Kindle, saw the eBook reader instantly said, if she didn’t have a Kindle, she would have probably bought the device on the spot.  That’s enough for me to say that I think the iPad will cut into the Kindle market share.  However, I would like to point out that the Kindle was specifically made to be read and to fade into the background, which is why it’s a dull gray color.   You can read the Kindle for several hours without it straining your eyes.  I’m not sure how long you could read the iPad without eye strain.  There still is a reflective gloss on the device and the brightness of the device may cause some issues to book readers.

One feature that definitely surprised me was the keyboard feature.  In my mind I thought that the device would most likely need a pen device in order for the device to be really usable.  But to my surprise, when I started using the keyboard functionality in the email app, it was really easy to type on.  I made several spelling mistakes, but only a few more than I would make typing on a normal keyboard.  I think this definitely lends the iPad to do more than I originally thought it would be able to do.  However, the only draw back to the typing functionality was that you would need to lay the iPad down on a flat surface to type much like you would need to do with a normal keyboard.  This is where I would imagine a pen-like device would work, so that you could write with one hand and not really need to lay down the device to type.

One downside that I saw was that most applications were not really made for the iPad yet.  The games seemed to have rendered fine, but other apps on the device looked like they were created for the iPhone.  You could tell because the anti-aliasing wasn’t as smooth and it should have been.  When you zoomed in on the application (to about the size of the iPhone), the application looked much better.

- Office 2008 – for my standard editing, spreadsheets, work email (entourage)

- iLife – primarily for iphoto – i tried picasa and hated it.  i tried aperature, loved it until i found out the full cost

- Adobe CS3 – primarily for photoshop and flash

- textmate – for my quick editing of files – word is just too clunky for this

- eclipse – for my java/php/js/html/css editing

- adium – for my chatting – (gmail, yahoo, msn, aol)

- tweetdeck – for twitter + facebook (hey add 4sq!)

- omnigraffle – for my IA work that i need to do

- quickbooks – for my accounting

- quicksilver – this is probably increases my efficiency on a mac by 10%.  if you don’t use it, you should look into it.

- transmit – my ftp program

What apps do you use?  I’d like to hear!

edit : ooops forgot about couple of thinigs: Firefox (with web developer and firebug plugins) and Charles my proxy to help debug transmissions between applications