My Kindle is safe…for now

I love my Kindle. It’s a great device. I’ve read many books on it, taken it to the beach and actually put a big zip lock over it so I can read it without getting sand it in (have you done that?). It’s a great device, no doubt about it.

But it’s ANOTHER device. My iPhone, Macbook Air and the Kindle. That’s three devices that I use a lot and my hope was that the iPad would possibly allow me to consolidate that list to two. Typically I end up leaving my Kindle at home when I travel because I really don’t want to bring two devices in my laptop bag and one in my pocket.  But to that end, when I travel I typically need my laptop for email, maybe tweaking a presentation, writing some blogs, using Twitter…and that’s about it.  And most of that I can actually do on the iPhone.  So I was hoping that the iPad would be the device that could bring the Kindle and my Air together to make a great short-travel device (and for that matter, a great sit-on-the-couch device).

And watching this video compells me even more to try the iPad, but its missing a few things that I really would need to make it the no-brainer that the iPhone is.

• Camera.  The fact that I can’t iChat (I’d say Skype but Apple would probably try to block Skype so I’d even settle just for iChat) with my family on the iPad while I’m traveling is just dumb. My guess is that Apple knows this and either needed to get this device out as quickly as possible, needed to keep the price down or most likely, wants us all to buy a new iPad in 9 months when they roll out the camera version.
• A non-app OS.  I need to run Mail with Exchange.  I need to be able to run Firefox and use the tools I’m used to when web browsing and not be locked into Safari.  And so forth and so on.
• I need multi-tasking.  To be clear, I don’t need multi-tasking on the iPhone the way that iPhone Haters proclaim it as a deal-breaker for them.  That’s absurd, I can easily switch from app to app with no problem on the iPhone and screen size makes it so I’d almost never be using two apps at the same time.  Would it be nice to run Pandora while emailing? Sure.  Is it critical?  No.  But on the iPad, I’d want to be able to have for example Tweetie on the right side running in column view with Mail open on the left side.  I’m sure they’ll correct this going forward.

That’s probably about it.  I need to get my hands on one so I can see if it is a sufficient device to travel with.  Since most everything I do is “in the cloud” — email and calendar on exchange, wordpress, twitter, contacts via Plaxo — it wouldn’t be a big deal to sync up my iPad with my laptop so that I could travel and not miss anything.  As long as iTunes syncs between the two which I’m not sure about yet.