Same words, different language.

My mother's offered to get me an iPad as a late birthday gift. She's been advocating for it pretty strongly - "it'll be good for travel" is the main argument. And it really is the sort of thing that makes for a good birthday gift from one's parents. I'm just not sure why she's suggested it at all. My brother has one, and I played on it for a little while last week to get some idea of what it's capable of.

The more I think about it, the less I know I'd be able to use an iPad for much of anything. I mean, I don't travel enough for 'travel' to be a good reason - I'm going to France with my family in May, and I'm going to Con.TXT in June, and that's all the travel I can see myself doing in the next year or so. Even during travel, I don't know what I could use it for. Browsing the internet would be nice, but that's not really something I'd need after the trip is over, so I might as well take the time to bodily separate myself from the internet for a few days and simply enjoy the luxury of not needing to regularly check my e-mail. Word processing would mean synching the iPad to my computer or e-mailing stuff back and forth, and even then the iPad doesn't really do word processing, not even with dedicated apps. An ereader would be useful, but why not pack a couple of dense paperbacks instead? Once I get back from the trip, I'd have my regular computer and my regular books, and the iPad would be a fancy redundancy. So I really can't grasp why my mother thinks I want one.

So to everyone with an iPad: what the hell do you use it for? Because I don't know. And maybe someone telling me would help me figure this out.