Mom, It has no camera... so it cannot do video chatting or camera work of any kind without adding an adaptor or using a bluetooth camera. Most laptops have built in cams... but that is not necessarily a bad thing. No video sexting for a kid going into puberty might be good...
The form factor of a laptop is NOT GOOD for reading books... the iPad’s is. The iPod touch is too small, I think to be a good book reader... but some find it OK. I don’t. I have an iPhone with the same size screen and while I can use it in a pinch, I prefer the full size book format of the iPad.
You can attach a bluetooth or hardwired keyboard to an iPad, making it much more like a notebook or laptop... but you still are locked into the iOS apps and cannot run more robust applications available for OSX. You still have a much larger canon of software available, though... the entire iPhone collection and a smaller iPad only collection that is growing daily. In November iOS 4.2 will be released and the iPad will be officially multitasking and you will be able to do much more. There are already word processing, spread sheet, and presentation software available... as well as drawing, painting, and photo enhancement apps. There are superb games, thousands of games, millions of books (many of them absolutely free), many free apps, fun things, serious things, tools that aren’t even available on a notebook...
WalMart started selling iPads yesterday, Target last week, and Best Buy two weeks ago... so you might be able to look at one there... but they will not have many apps on them. An iPad only comes alive after you’ve installed apps... then you start to wonder how you ever got along without one.
I was really hoping that the touch would be adequate just on a cost issue. You talked about iOS would that be like the ipad version of OSX? (Im really behind apparently)
I will assume that the ipad would make his school reports and presentations easier and neater. I guess I should go and see about apps and such. When did 11 year olds get so technical, I cant keep up. Thank you much for your reply.