Sturdy and handy iPad has weathered its first half-year admirably

WIRED:Sure it's got its limits, but the Apple tablet continues to prove its worth on many fronts, writes DANNY O'BRIEN

IT'S SIX months since I slunk into an Apple store here in San Francisco, bought one of those brand-new iPads with my own money, and wrote up a review for The Irish Times.

I’m always a bit sceptical of first-week reviews, and tried to hedge my bets a little. I could see it was going to be a fun device, but I wasn’t sure exactly what it was for, and said so.

But I could also sense that this was going to be a big deal. Not the most profound insight, I grant you, given the endless reams of publicity the thing gained, and the millions spent by Apple on advertising. But as someone who likes to follow new technology into the heavens or into the dustbin, I didn’t regret forking over money to Mr Jobs for a ride on the rollercoaster.

Have I got any better idea of where this thing is going, six months on?

As an owner, I can tell you what the iPad is not doing. First, it’s not gathering dust. Even in a home jammed with computers, the iPad still gets an airing on a regular basis – I wouldn’t say daily, but probably more than twice a week.

That’s doing pretty well. I’m interested in gadgets, but I don’t often cave in to buying one. Yet when I do, it’s surprising how often the object of my obsession ends up stuck in a drawer after the excitement has worn off. Over the years, I have had, at various times, a Nokia tablet, a Psion organiser, a programmable smartphone, and various MP3 players, cameras and other widgets. I’ve even bought a (second-hand) Apple Newton.

After a few months, most were abandoned as they failed to fit into my life, pocket or patterns of unusually violent clumsiness and absentmindedness.

The iPad has successfully hung around. I may be tempting fate to say it’s indestructible, but it has survived both my and my daughters’ rough play.

Just when I begin to get a little uninterested, some new app appears in the iTunes store and my curiosity fires up again. Last month, it was a game called Plants vs Zombies, which is as surreally addictive as the name suggests. This week, it was a program called Air Display, which lets the iPad work as a second monitor to my laptop.

None of these are "killer apps" (programs that justify buying an iPad just to use) for the device: Plants vs Zombieswas already available for the PC, Mac and iPhone before its iPad debut, for instance. But each month brings another intriguing new use for the tablet, and keeps it out of the back of the gadget drawer.

What else hasn’t it done? Well, it hasn’t replaced my laptop, that’s for sure. Like a few other geeks of my acquaintance, I spent some time trying to use the iPad as my exclusive portable computing device. It was a fun experiment, sort of like going camping or trying a new diet of exclusively eating pineapples or something, but it became clear to me very quickly that I wasn’t going to be living the iPad life full-time.

At least for now, an iPad needs a laptop for synchronising and backing-up. And anyone who works (like me) in a job collecting and disseminating information needs a proper keyboard.

Talking of jobs, I also don't think the iPad is going to save anybody's media industry any time soon. I've downloaded the iPad equivalent of glossy magazines like Wiredand Esquire, as well as versions of newspapers such as the Financial Timesand the Wall Street Journal. There are some intriguing experiments going on here, but they still feel to me like the expensive dabbling of an industry whose real skill is creating captivating written content, within a far more complex world of interactive software.

I don't need an app to read the New York Times,and I'm not sure the New York Timesneeds to write an app to get me to read it.

Of course, the reason why these companies are creating dedicated iPad programs is because you can sell apps for a few bucks, while you don’t appear to be selling much apart from advertising on the web.

As a part-time participant in that particular industry, I can say I don’t expect newspapers to come up with an exciting new application every month. And, as a consumer, I don’t expect to buy it every month either. My app budget goes elsewhere.

Six months on, I still feel that the iPad is feeling its way. Its feature set, in common with how the modern Apple corporation works, remains polished but relatively minimal.

Next month, there’ll be a much-anticipated operating system upgrade for these tablets, which will let them showcase the miracles of modern software such as running more than one program at the same time.

Will it turn it into a laptop? Will it make for a genre-busting media device to compete with radio and television in the history books?

Hardly. But it’ll continue to keep me, the average iPad user, happy. And really, what more than “happy” do you want from a gadget like this?