What Would You Do With an iPad?

From the moment Steve Jobs first held up the iPad at Wednesday's media event many a pundit and critic has stood up to decry the device's shortcomings and proclaim it a failure. In the course of publishing our own opinions on the device, including my column, "Understanding the iPad Starts with Understanding Apple," a few of our readers have responded with something I found particularly interesting, and that is describing what they wish they could do or planned to do with the device once they could get one.

Personally, I'm not overly interested in what the iPad can't do - that was one of the subthemes of the above-mentioned column. The device will not succeed or fail in the marketplace based on what it can not do, but rather what it does well, what it does better than a laptop and better than a smartphone.

As smart as the folks at Apple are, even those seven tasks that the company claims the iPad does better than a laptop and better than a smartphone (Web browsing, e-mail, photo-viewing, video-watching, music listening, games, and reading eBooks) are not likely going to be all the ways iPad owners apply the device.

Accordingly, we're asking our readers to tell us what you think you'll use it for. Tell us what kind of plans so you have for the device.

As I noted above, a few of you have already begun doing so in our article comments, but I'm asking you to send me an e-mail with your thoughts. We'll take the best submissions and publish them on TMO next week.

Send your notes to the e-mail address in my byline (where it is automagically hidden from spambots by the magic of Javascript), and remember: Succinctness is next to Steveliness.