I spent some time in the past month trying to find some good reasons to buy an iPad. I think today I found a big one.
First, for those who don’t know Instapaper, let me introduce it. Instapaper is a great service which lets you save webpages for reading offline later, either on your web browser, or in your iPhone. It’s great for that cool news article or blog entry you found on the web but don’t have time to read at that moment. You just have to create an account at their website and add a bookmarklet to your web browser to use it. Then you can read things later at their website or in their iPhone app. Moreover, it’s compatible with the most popular news readers out there, like Google Reader and NetNewsWire, and with most Twitter apps as well.
The bigger drawbacks of Instapaper weren’t caused by flaws in the service itself, but by the lack of a proper place to read it. Reading on the computer isn’t practical – I just can’t sit on the couch with a laptop on my lap while drinking wine because it’s too uncomfortable. And the iPhone screen is too small for reading a lot. You can read on Kindle, which is nice, but most people (myself included) don’t own a Kindle.
But now, the iPad offers probably the best solution because this is exactly the kind of usability that falls in the pit between laptops and smartphones.
So, this is one reason to buy an iPad. Let’s see if I can find more until April 3rd. 🙂