Today I was experimenting with my wife's iPad and the Apple Wireless Keyboard to see just how productive I could be with a simple iPad and Keyboard. As a matter of fact this post is written in safari using the iPad and the apple wireless keyboard. I have to say that my experiments this weekenend were rather positive! Doing basic web surfing, blogging and paper writings (using pages) was a breeze! I could honestly say that this combination is a lighter replacement for a traditional laptop and can satisfy most of my road warrior needs. It is true that once you factor in a wireless keyboard, the iPad is as expensive as an inexpensive PC laptop, and definitely more expensive than a netbook, but it is much lighter than either solution! Hmmm... I wonder what it would look like if Apple were to make a a MacBook air that had the same size screen as the iPad...

In any case, things weren't completely seamless in my usage this weekend - there are things that apple really needs to improve upon when using an attached bluetooth keyboard with an iOS device. The first thing are common word processing keyboard shortcuts like command-B (for bold), command-i (for italic) and command-u )for underline). It was really frustrating to not be able to format my text without having to lift my hands from the keyboard.

The second thing is that apple needs to enable command-tab on the iOS. Since iOS can now multitask, it would be nice to be able to switch from IM to Pages to the Safari, to whatever else doing command-tab instead of lifting the hands from the keyboard to do the home-button-double-tap.

Finally, it would be really cool if I could have functionality attached to most of the function keys. For example, it would be awesome if iOS had a dashboard, similar to MacOS X's dashboard, so that I could hit the dashboard key on the iPad and immediatelly get all my widgets to show up (translation, current time and weather as well as a calculator as my most commonly used widgets on the Mac...and probably on iOS if this functionality existed).

All things considered, this was pretty cool! Now the dilemma is this: buy an iPad 2 now, or wait for iPad 3? hmmmm....