“Huh? First thing I did when I bought an iPad several years ago was to buy a stylus, for one dollar. Works fine.”
...and...
“A stylus is a powerful tool for those who need it, but that’s a small percentage of the user base.”
As a content consumption device, the iPad is great.
It could be a lot more useful with more stylus aware apps, and an actual Apple-supported stylus. It certainly has the CPU horsepower to (finally) do good handwriting recognition. Regardless, it’s not great having fat fingers obscure the screen when you’re working.
There’s a major rumor of a larger iPad coming with a stylus for note-taking students and other uses. I hope so!
@roadcat: “You can’t do serious photoshop work on an iPad, I’ve done some graphics (with apps like SketchBook Pro) on my iPad but prefer the desktop environment for serious work.”
One thing to consider is the melding of remote CPU horsepower (your desktop) with the iPad as a display and input device. That area is yet to be exploited effectively in a lot of domains. I agree that tablets will never suffice for some work though.
One such app that I've been using is FileBrowser. It allows me to use my iPad to manipulate files on all the computers on my home LAN. Makes it a breeze to copy and move files around. Also makes it easy to view the hundreds of digital movies I have stored on a NAS at my router, for viewing on the iPad so I don't have to locally store it, and I can also stream it to my HD TV via Apple TV. Used to walk over to my other computers, now I partially control them remotely with the iPad. No one device can suffice to please everyone, that's why a mix of devices works out better. Sort of like automobiles - a sports car can't haul freight, a family car is necessary for kids, and a big truck is limiting in fun, so I own all.