Is the iPad too All Consuming as a Media Consumptive Device?

I know all the techies in the office are laughing about how much I am enjoying my new iPad but it has become a way for me to have instant access to information at my fingertips no matter where I am and to attempt to keep up with the never ending amount of information that is create moment to moment about the world around us. “How so?” you ask…

With the number of different email accounts that I manage, the ability to hop between email accounts to read and respond to messages that are constantly coming in. While the constant dinging of the new mail received can sometimes be annoying the ability to have access to those trying to reach out to me is important. It will be nice when IOS4 becomes available for the iPad to bring email unification to bear as well.

I seem to be living in the Reeder app lately trying to keep up with all the RSS feeds that I have subscribed to. Some of the sites that I have subscribed to are very prolific because of the number of different contributors that posting to them and so this becomes a real task. But having the ability to quickly go down my list of feeds and earmark the ones that I want to focus on is really nice. I use this a lot in conjunction with Instapaper which allows me to capture the posting for archiving or later research. The ability to quickly drill down to the original posting and then to jump to the references that are placed within the articles is truely a time saver and creates a much richer experience.

While I am still waiting anxiously to see the offerings arrive from other manufacturers to give Apple a run for their money, Apple has a real winner here. As more applications become available on this device to allow me to do my job even better, it is going to keep the bar rising for others to catch up to.