I have had my iPad 2 for a couple of weeks now after waiting 6 weeks while it was in the never ending Apple shipping cue. After using it for this brief period of time I do have to say that this is one powerful, fast, and downright sexy piece of technology.

I find the screen size to be just the right size, the speed to be more than adequate, the screen to be crisp, and the keyboard to be very easy to do a substantial amount of typing on. There are also some fantastic apps that look great and are very functional.

Number one would be Flipboard, a free app (though easily worth $ for) that takes your rss, twitter, Facebook, flicker, Instagram, plus numerous other feeds from news to lifestyle to sports and puts it all in a visual interactive interface that makes reading through all your content enjoyable. I especially like how it will look for links and photos in Facebook posts and tweets and expands them so you can see all the pictures and twitter content without leaving the interface, will even open up the original we page or a video player right inside the app for added visual greatness.

The Big Picture app put out by the Boston Globe is a great app that brings photojournalism to the forefront.  The photo staff put out slideshows of amazing news photography with one or two sentence captions describing the photo.

My third favorite app so far is Instapaper.  I use this now instead of bookmarking web pages as it caches pages and allows me to view them while off-line.  A definite plus when one only has the Wi-fi iPad.

These three apps have the majority of my attention.  If I come across another app that I feel is really good or just plain cool I will be sire to post.