One Week with an iPad

A week ago today Apple released the 3G iPad and I was lucky enough to pickup the last 64GB 3G model not reserved for a pre-order at the Apple Store. A few questioned why I picked up the ‘over-sized iPod Touch’. While this maybe be a fairly accurate description of the device, trust me it’s way off the mark. It’s so far off the mark, I’d like to share with how the iPad has impacted me this week.

A bit of background

I have what I consider to be one of the best roles anyone could have. I work on a team responsible for product integration testing and validation with platforms, hypervisors, operating systems, applications, and systems management and orchestration tools.

In this role I interface with a wide range of individuals ranging from teammates, product managers, technical directors, etc to partner engineers and PMs, customer decision makers and administrators. Suffice to say, a wide range of individuals each of whom look at business challenges a bit differently.

When it comes to discussing storage concepts relevant to virtual machines, like LUNs, volumes, data reduplication, compression, embedded objects, virtual disks, etc… It’s fair to say it’s easy to get lost in the conversation. Presentations and whiteboards commonly aide in communication, but these devices aren’t portable.

The epiphany

I picked up the iPad Friday evening and boarded my flight for the VMware TechSummit on Saturday morning. During the flight I installed a few apps (thanks to some suggestions from Wade Oharrow). With my new set of work tools I am able to remotely connect to desktop sessions (Windows, Linux, and OS X), connect to file servers (internal and cloud-based), scribble out ideas on electronic whiteboards, and display presentations.

It was after installing these apps when it hit me. I have un-tethered myself from my laptop for the majority of my meetings and interactions!

As each day of the TechSummit passed my MacBook Pro remained in the backpack, back in the hotel room.

A new means of personal interaction

With each conversation, I found I was reaching for the iPad as a means to inject rich media into the dialog. Providing me the ability to discuss more abstract and forward thinking concepts in greater detail and with more clarity. I began calling this the media rich personal conversation.

The world will never be the same

Imagine what VMworld will be like this fall. Gone is the need to crowd around a monitor in vendors booth in order to learn about their next generation technology. This fall I envision attendees engaging with individuals armed with an iPad who will share the vision of the company, answer technical questions, present canned and live demos, and summarize the interaction via an email compete with URLs to documents and demos, screenshots from live demos and whiteboard drawings.

In other words, I can’t wait for VMworld!

Thank you Apple for the great device, now if I can get Blogo for the iPad I’ll be in business…