As Spider's resident Apple fanboy I was up bright and early to be down at the Buchanan Street Apple store for the launch of the iPad. £740 (A 32gb 3G model and accessories) and two weeks later I thought I'd give you my thoughts on living with the thing. The first thing it's done is made my iPhone 3G unusable. The A4 processor in the iPad makes it fly and I now have no tolerance for the treacle like performance of my trusty phone. Thankfully there is only a week until the release of the iPhone 4.

It's now mostly replaced my laptop for web browsing at home. It's much more comfortable to use than my laptop propped up on the arm of my sofa. There is something rather engaging about interacting with web pages via touch on such a large screen and it some how feels faster than browsing on my laptop. The stand that is built into the Apple case is great – I can now easily watch something on iPlayer whilst cooking in the kitchen.

It has also transformed my daily commute from Edinburgh to Glasgow. I could never quite get into watching video on the iPhone screen  - gave me a bit of a sore head – but it's very enjoyable on the iPad and an episode of Lost makes time on the train just fly by. And if I get bored with video I can always read a book (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo at the moment) or comic (Scott Pilgrim vs  The World in anticipation of the amazing looking film). Also for mobile browsing, where once you needed an app for optimal usability (Facebook or The Guardian, for example), now the native webpage works just as well or better.

Although I don't quite agree with Apple's hyperbolic 'Magical' marketing message, the iPad does offer us a glimpse into the future. The Wired app with it's interactive elements and embedded video shows the future of magazine/newspaper publishing. The Photo app shows us the future of the user interface. All it needs is the facetime video chat feature from the new iPhone for it to feel like we're living in Star Trek.