You’ve heard the jokes about the name, you’ve heard all of the media coverage, and you might have even seen Stephen Colbert at the Grammys with one.  And it’s also possible that you might still be on the fence when it comes to buying the once highly anticipated and now highly overhyped iPads.  Although it arguably isn’t exactly the paradigm shifter than many claimed it would be, the iPad still does have a few good points.  We’ll help you sort out if it’s worth $500 of your hard earned money in handy sound byte fashion below.

Why You’d Love an iPad

It’s a great fresh approach to a home computer.  More than likely, you’ll want to sit on the couch just browsing the web or photos once you get home from work and away from a traditional mouse and keyboard PC or Mac.  An iPad might just be a great new way of doing just that.

It’s also a fantastic eReader.  It may take a year or so for publishers to come to grasp with the device, but it’s easy to see how this might be a fantastic platform to read newspapers and magazines on.  You do remember those, right?

It’s got a lot more processing horsepower.  This is another case of where it’s going to take time to developers to catch up, but the increased speed of this device is going to make for some really great apps.  And also, some really great games.

Yes, it’s through Satan (AT&T), but the data plan for the iPad is really nice.  If you would only use it here and there, you can get a capped plan at just fifteen bucks a month.  If you need an all you can eat plan, it’s only thirty a month.  But perhaps best of all, it’s uncontracted.  If you just need it for one month, you can just buy  it for that time period.  You won’t be locked into an agreement and can just get a months worth of data whenever you need it.

Why You’ll Hate This Thing

If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, you already have an iPad Nano.  Other than coming with a much bigger screen, the iPad does very little that previously existing iPhone OS devices do not.  Another drawback here is that the iPhone OS can be pretty limiting depending on how you need to use it.  It won’t have anything like the OS X finder, meaning you can’t directly access files outside of apps.  Which in of itself could be a dealbreaker for power users.

The backwards compatibility sucks.  Yes, you’ll be able to get all kinds of iPhone apps and games on day one on this device.  But they’re either going to take up a laughably small portion of the big screen, or they’re going to be stretched and pixelated beyond recognition.

The price isn’t as great as Apple is trying to convince you it is.  Five hundred bucks is just about what you’d be paying for an unlocked iPhone free of AT&T’s shackles, which is essentially what this is.  Except it doesn’t make calls, doesn’t take pictures, and doesn’t fit in your pocket.  What it does do nicely that other iPhone OS devices doesn’t is serve as an eReader.  If you want that, the Amazon Kindle is less than half of the price and twice as nice on your eyes.

Overall, you’re probably going to know fairly quickly if the iPad is for you or not.  If you’ve already got a ton of similar devices sitting around, you likely won’t find much space for this in your life.  However, if you just have a need for a simple computer in your home that doesn’t take a lot of space or hassle, the iPad might be for you.

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