On April 6th, some fourteen-plus hours after leaving Japan and maybe at good twenty six hours after my last bit of sleep, I drove to the Apple Store and picked up a 32 gig WiFi iPad. I can say without a doubt it has been a whirlwind love affair with the device ever since.

Now, I get the criticisms. Closed-end system. New technology, etc. But for me the iPad is all about one thing, content consumption made easy. I make my living writing and as such I consume TONS of material in the name of research in every form you can imagine.

I’ve had a Kindle for about a year and enjoy it immensely. I read a decent number of books every month and like the instant gratification of on-the-spot wireless delivery. As someone who is in possession of more books than I have room for anymore, I very much appreciate not having more physical copies to find places for in my office, bedroom or living room. A lot of what I read are books that I will read only once. Small digital files in my device are the perfect places for them. I especially like only paying about ten bucks for a recent release that I would otherwise have to pay more for in hardback. I am probably a (no pun intended) textbook case of an ebook consumer.

So of course the first thing I did after plugging my new iPad into iTunes and registering it with Apple was to download and boot up the Kindle app. Boom. There it was, my entire digital library of bestsellers I’ve bought so far and much like the Kindle itself or any of the Kindle apps for iPhone or the Mac, it opened up all the books on the last pages I had read. With the small-screen Kindle and the pace at which I read, I’m hitting the ‘next page’ button every thirty seconds. On the iPad, with much more screen real estate, I feel more like I’m reading a real page worth of content before tapping the edge of the screen to flip pages. Another plus with the iPad is its backlit screen allowing me to read in bed without a spouse-disturbing light turned on. The iPad is undoubtedly heavier than the Kindle but there is none of that e-ink page refresh that, though I’ve gotten used to, still bugs me a bit.

One of the things I have enjoyed on my iPhone are digital comics. I’m a big fan of the Comixology app but I haven’t regularly bought comics with it because the small-screen experience just doesn’t really satisfy. However, on the iPad, comic books totally rock.

After re-reading, and thoroughly enjoying much more, the comics I have already bought on Comixology, I went and dove into Mark Millar’s brilliant series “Kick Ass” (the source material for the recently released movie of the same name). What is great about comics on the iPad is that now the panels are at least as large as they would be in print and as digital images, much more clear than paper and ink can provide. Even better was the ability to pinch-zoom on a panel to make it bigger so I could really see the detail (or blow up the text for my aging eyes).

And sure I downloaded the Marvel app as well which I really liked but was a bit bummed by the sample-size number of titles they had available. Even still, the free download of The Avengers was enjoyed by me as much as if I had been reading a print copy.

Though the number of comic book titles available digitally are small in comparison to what you’d find at your local brick and mortar comic shop, for someone like me who isn’t a hardcore comic book and collector (I’m not a bagger and boader), it works. Plus, I think it’s a pretty safe bet that it won’t be long before most comic book companies totally embrace this new medium. Just get me all of Garth Ennis’ Punisher TPB’s in digital already, Marvel!

Digital magazines are fantastic on this platform. I’ve had the Zinio app on my iPhone for a while because I get lots and lots of free magazines, some of them in digital form. I don’t enjoy reading a digital magazine on my computer at my desk and the experience is not so great on the iPhone though it will do in a pinch. However, Zinio’s iPad app really makes me feel like I’m reading a full magazine. Pages look like pages and with my National Geographic subscription, I can see all those award-winning nature photos in their full glory. I love reading periodicals but as with newspapers and comic books, I don’t like having to hold onto the physical copies. I definitely feel much more ecologically responsible reading on the iPad.

Netflix movies play beautifully on the iPad. At home, I use a Roku box to stream Netflix to the big screen TV and love the ease of use. On the iPad I was able to watch one of my alltime favorite flicks, Fletch on the back patio with headphones and then finish it up later in bed. The small screen that close takes up a good portion of your field of vision and the effect is very satisfying.

And of course there’s the web. Apple’s new A4 processor clocks at 1Ghz but it screams on the iPad. I swear pages load faster than on Safari on my MacBook Pro. No tabbed browsing in favor of the iPhone-like one window at a time system is not my favorite way to browse but it still lets me keep a page while I browse another window. I read a lot of news, most of it online and surfing the web on the iPad is super snappy. Again, here I can pinch-zoom to resize an article on the fly which is great. Also, I have to say there is something very “Minority Report” type cool about using a decent size touchscreen to browse the web. I do feel much more engaged with the content this way than at my desk with my mouse.

Lastly, battery life is killer. I’ve used the thing for hours at a time without getting close to draining the juice. I do believe the Apple estimate of 10 hours on a charge is accurate. Also I’ve had no WiFi issues with my Airport Extreme router. I didn’t bother getting the 3G enabled iPad because I figured there’d be some kind of way to tether it with my iPhone. Turns out there is, an app called MyWi that turns your jailbroken iPhone into a wireless 3G router.

In short, for me, the iPad is basically a magic electronic book which allows me to get news, books, comics, video, the web, email and movies in a nice compact package. I used to eat breakfast at my desk to read the news. Now I can sit at the table and read it on my newfangled “digital newspaper”. I feel like not only am I more engaged with more content but I can better consume it on my own terms. I am truly loving Apple’s new lifestyle device because it so far does exactly I wanted it to and it does it with little effort. Consider me a very satisfied user.