Order Placed

I ordered my iPad 2 today!1!  I chose the basic 16 GB WiFi only model in black to match the color of my other electronics and most of the things I own.  I have WiFi at home, of course, and it's even available at IHOP these days for goodness sake so I'm not too worried about being outside of a hotspot for very long (I don't spend a lot of time at IHOP or anything, just making a point).  I also splurged and bought the $29 dock for this until so that I can have a place to display it in my room.  The fact that the dock will give me a place to set the iPad to charge and that the dock can be connected to a set of speakers makes it all the more worth it in my mind.  I didn't buy the fancy new cover because i don't like the color options for the $39 polyurethane covers and I don't want to have to take out a loan for the $69 leather covers.  Seriously, for 70 bucks it better have a vibrate mode (hehe).

 

"Cause I'm back in black!"

I was really debating this purchase for a long time because of the price.  I know that I could get even more computing power in terms of RAM, hard drive space, a physical keyboard, etc. if I went with a much cheaper netbook. What pushed me over the edge is that I had gift cards from the Apple store totally $200 that have been collecting dust waiting in my room for almost two years now.  I keep telling myself that I should wait for the next great thing to come out.  I obsessively checked the refurbished Mac goodies to see if anything dropped so low in price that I just couldn't live without it.  I debated the $850 white MacBook.  I thought about a more expensive iMac with a bigger screen and 4GB of RAM, which dropped to $999 at one point. Alas, nothing on the Apple website ever got to the point where I said to myself that I absolutely must have this.  Even with the gift card it was all a little too expensive to justify purchasing.  Finally, I gave in and chose to buy the iPad 2 because the reviews are great, their advertising finally got to me, the gift cards made it vaguely justifiable in terms of price and just the idea of using a touch screen tablet style computer intrigues me greatly.

I made a promise to myself when I made this purchase that I would not use my iPad for games.  I enjoy gaming but I don't like the idea of dropping so much money on a portable video game system.  I've played my share of Plants vs. Zombies and while it's incredibly entertaining, it's also a huge waste of time.  I don't think anyone is going to remember my name years or decades from now because I'm handy with the threepeater and the cherry bomb.

 

I know that there are all kinds of other games out there but I don't want to spend time and money just playing games.  I have things to accomplish after all!  Plus, I'm not made of money so I want to avoid draining my bank account a few dollars at a time downloading the latest and greatest way for me to waste time.

What I do want to use my iPad for is productivity.  I like the fact that it has a camcorder built-in that shots video in 720p.  I'm excited about the possibility of shooting video in HD and uploading it to YouTube as I'm out and about. I'm excited about watching tutorials and how to guides using my new iPad on topics that interest me on YouTube.  I'll post links to good ones later on this blog.

Also, only on rare occasion will I use my new iPad for evil and only if someone or something really deserves it- joking, of course! 

All of this is good news for your reader because it means that I will be posting information here about free software for the iPad 2.  If any of you own the latest iPad or are thinking of purchasing one you should find useful information here in later posts.

Unfortunately, my new toy/ tool of productivity won't even be shipping until the end of this month.  Now, sadly, it's time for me to play the waiting game.