I’ve spent the last few days playing with my new iPad. I don’t really think of myself as an Apple fanboy, but evidence might be starting to mount. I originally wanted an iPad for application testing – I’m working on a few projects that would benefit from ultra-mobility and reasonable screen size.

To me this is a whole new category of device, and I wanted to get a real feel for what this thing was all about. I already have or use the devices around the niche the iPad appears to be destined for – the MacBook, the iPhone, netbook – but I really did see this as Something Completely Different. I desperately wanted to like the Windows Tablet; I’d been an early Palm user (III/V/m105) and I tried two early generations (a Compaq TC1000 and a Toshiba M205). I carried them from meeting to class to meeting, but it never clicked. I saw the potential, but the experience was truly lacking for me.

Yes, I am still ticked off that there’s no Flash – I enjoy building apps in Flex and AIR. I’m even more disappointed that Apple appears to have removed the blue brick icon when a missing plugin is needed for page content. I have yet to see one in Safari when browsing Web sites. This was serving as an ensign for the Flash community. If Apple has indeed removed this emblem, perhaps Flash developers should put that icon in the alternate content area of the embed/object tag. [Update 4/13/10: Someone has done precisely that]

But the real amazing thing to me has been all the vitriol about the iPad – it’s like the usual unsocialized nonsense of Slashdot has exploded all over the Web. It frankly reminds me of the early days of Twitter – “Why would anyone want to know what I had for breakfast?” was the usual slant. And that showed that they didn’t *get it*

I also feel the same sort of guarded optimism as I did with Twitter – something’s different here. Now that folks with an inclination to develop have the actual devices, There Will Be Code. And from that code will come new kinds of applications and uses that we have only begun to consider.