Guess what the most wanted christmas present will be...

I use a cover that works quite well. I always use the ipad sideways, so that the keyboard is bigger and the format of the pages is good. Its not great for responding to emails but it works. For reading them its perfect. I love it very much, then again im sure it will become better over time. I have the autocorrection disabled because I write emails and messages in various languages.

My point was not a general one about tech products becoming obsolete with time. You and I are perfectly capable of assessing the range of tech products available at this point in time, weighing up the advantages of buying now versus what products are likely to be available soon, and making a buying decision which is optimally satisfactory. Additionally, we have large disposable incomes, so even if we are not that happy with one or two of the purchases we make it is generally not a big deal for us.

Kids on the other hand are, in general, poorly informed, vulnerable to fads, and have limited disposable incomes. I'm sure a lot of kids barely even know what an iPad is - they just know they want one. And when they get it, and they do what kids generally do with these devices - play games - how are they supposed to know that the iPad sucks for gaming? For a lot of the current generation of kids, the iPad will be an entry point into gaming - it has the cachet that Nintendo had for earlier generations. Kids buy or ask for iPads because then they can show them off at school. But the iPad is such a limited device - the cost for a highly modular OS with an abundant app ecosystem is that there's just not much to get your teeth into with the device. The most interesting thing you can do with the OS is long-press an icon until they all start to wiggle.

I watch my little brother with his $600 iPad. First he's playing Dragonvale - a Farmville clone - for hours. Then he's playing GTA3 - do you know that videogame is 10 years old I ask him? Don't you want to play it with a real controller instead of slidy glass controls on a heavy tablet? Then he plays Chinatown Wars - more slidy glass controls for a ported DS game. Maybe I'm just being cranky and my-generation-was-better-ist. Maybe there's a lot to be said for one device that can do all of these things. Maybe the iPad is great because first kids plays with the games, then they find other cool apps, then suddenly they've set up recording studios at home. I dunno. Anyway as a game-playing device in my opinion the iPad is too limited, and as a useful tablet I think it is very far from a mature ideal of how a tablet could work - and I think tablets will evolve very, very quickly over the next three years, and the iPad will look very outdated soon. So I feel sorry for the kids because I think they could do better for gaming and because their new treasure is about to submerged in a looming surge of innovation.