I have always been an apple fan.. Their products are neatly designed, user oriented and most advanced as compared to other brands. The products are innovative and gives others a benchmark to work on.
I bought my ipad in September, it costed me 499$ I was coming back to India and I just could not resist the temptation to buy one.
Here are my observations:
Design:
The design is beautiful, slim and simple. However you do need a case to protect the back or otherwise it will have minor to major scratches depending on the personal use.
There are no useless buttons cramped up and everything is neatly put up in its place be it the home button, the power button or the volume buttons. But somehow I do feel that its heavy and its too risky to work around it unless you have it in a case.. The design could have been better, it lacks grip and one can easily drop it.
Screen Size:
The screen is beautiful and sharp, the colurs are just awesome and I have not experienced the same in any of the contending tablets. I have seen visible difference in color and quality while watching the same movie or reading a book or magazine in ipad or on LCD screen or any other tablet.
The size is just perfect, neither too big, nor too small. I somehow feel that 7" is small, but thats maybe cause I am used to the 9.7"sceen size.
Battery:
Unlike apple 3G whose battery sucks to the core. iPad on the other hand has an amazing battery life, true to its word it does last nearly 10 hrs on a single full charge.
Applications: I dont think there is any other company which alone has so many developers producing so many applications every day. The applications are not very expensive and are really useful.
Now from my personal viewpoint:
I have never come across such intuitve design in any other product if you compare it with ipad
The screen size is perfect along with the quality of colors and brightness
I can get my office emails and other google eamails configured easily on ipad and all my office doucments open after downloading the goodreader app from the appworld.
If you want to watch movies, listen to music, browse through family pictures, surf internet at its best, do minimal office work, read magazines, books etc then this is the best device you can get for nearly Rs 25000/-
Though it does not support flash and does not have a USB/mini USB port but still you will love this device as it caters to nearly all the day to day work and entertainment needs.