Lots of people have already written reviews of the iPad, but since I live in the UK, I hadn’t seen or held one in the flesh until recently. Not my own, unfortunately, as the UK iPad won’t be released until late May.

Firstly, the hardware itself is beautiful; like a Macbook Pro lid or a 1st generation iPhone, it’s all aluminumn & glass. Several people have said it’s smaller than they expected, and most have also said that it’s heavier then they thought too. But not too heavy; just a nice “heft” — I find it similar to holding a moderately sized hardback textbook. When you walk around with it, you do feel like you are from the future.

The screen is fantastic, and as wide-angle as advertised. It’s glossy, and despite being oleophobic, it seems to pick up fingerprints far more than my iPhone. The solution to both those problems seems to that it has a nice bright backlight which pushes the image through smudges and glare easily.

When I first played with it, I was slightly underwhelmed. It looks just like a big iPod Touch, as everyone has claimed. But it turns out, that’s no bad thing.

The increased screen real estate makes a big difference. Web pages now feel very much like they do on the desktop, eBooks can be read easily and games are much more detailed and easier to control. And Google Maps is just breathtaking, which I was suprised by — it’s just a map, after all.

And the speed — the glorious speed. This thing is *fast*. Like *really* fast. The iPhone isn’t a slouch, by any means, but the speed increase makes the whole experience of using an iPad so much smoother.

The iPad is something that gets better and better the more you personalise it, I think. Having all my apps and personal info in it would make an already impressive experience superb. It’s like meeting a charming person who grows into a close friend the more you spend time together. (Does that anology make me sound a bit weird? Probably)

The lack of Flash isn’t something I really care about. The websites I do visit just don’t have annoying Flash-based ads, which is a win in my book, and stuff like YouTube, Vimeo and so on all work fine. The lack of Farmville means that my wife shouldn’t steal it too much. I think a native Farmville app would be massive on this thing, however.

I would certainly reccommend the 3G version to my father-in-law apart from one thing; the lack of video codec support. He gets a lot of ‘funny’ videos emailed to him from friends and family members, and they are often in AVI format, which the iPad doesn’t natively support. On the Mac, the great Perian takes care of that, but there isn’t any way of adding in QuickTime components on the iPad. I’m hoping somebody comes up with some kind of official VLC app that hooks into the email system soon.

But overall, this is a great bit of kit, and I’m certainly going to be using it for Sofa-Surfing, PDF/eBook reading, and light productivity work. Now I just need to wait until May.