I finally received my fancy new iPad on Monday, and I figured I would share some first impressions. I'll post something slightly longer later, perhaps in the context of whatever Apple unveils at its iPhone OS 4 event tomorrow afternoon.

For the most part, I really like the device. It's extremely fast, snappy and responsive. Whereas the iPhone often struggles with complex web pages, the iPad rivals my laptop in tasks like rendering web pages or paging through high resolution photos. The device's peppiness obviates the need for most multitasking, save for the ability to run background processes for music players and syncing, as I discusses in my previous post. Applications open almost instantly in most cases, and those that have been reworked for the iPad do an excellent job of saving the application state on quit, so applications appear just as they were left when they're reopened.

The gigantic multitouch display makes the device itself melt away. It's hard to describe just how intuitive it feels to browse the web with a touch interface on a display so relatively expansive. But suffice it to say that it's orders of magnitude better than the experience on the relatively minuscule iPhone- or iPod touch-size display.

I've been using the device extensively as I work on final research papers for two of my economics courses. It's much easier to enlarge graphs, pan around data tables and quickly navigate through long research articles on the iPad's big multitouch display than on my laptop or on my Kindle.

Of course, the iPad is not perfect. Despite all the talk about it only weighing 1.5 pounds — which I will concede is impressive, given the device's capabilities — its form factor is not conducive to being held comfortably for hours on end. For long form, linear reading, I still prefer the Kindle's E Ink display and more compact, lighter profile.

The iPad's software keyboard — which really is almost exactly the same size as a conventional keyboard when the iPad is in "landscape mode" — is no substitute for a mechanical keyboard as far as I'm concerned. It's better than the iPhone's keyboard by miles, but I suspect most touch typists will be disappointed. (For hunt-and-peck typists, though, it might be an improvement, thanks to the large key size and iPhone-style automatic suggestions and corrections.)

It's also clear that most third-party developers suffered as a result of not having prerelease access to the device. The ABC Player application, for instance, seems to crash every other time I launch it.

And while the device does run most iPhone applications, the iPhone applications are no substitute for applications that have been written or retooled for the iPad. I was sorely disappointed with the iPhone version of OmniFocus on the iPad. (I can only hope the OmniGroup has an iPad version out the door soon!)

Shortcomings aside, though, I suspect this device has forever changed the way people compute. With a few more features and some software tweaks, I could easily see the iPad becoming many peoples' primary or sole computer in just a few years time.