The iPad 2 has an incredibly innovative design, the adverts were not lying about navigation controls & ease of use. Swooshing your fingers over the responsive screen is a pleasurable experience, and the keyboard that pops up is big enough to accommodate the pudgy stubby things I call fingers, I can even retain a respectable WPM score.

The gyroscopic feature works well, shifting the display round to whatever orientation you pitch the iPad in. There is only one 'home' button, everything else is done through the touch display. You can use this to navigate and zoom, being an extension of the incredible touchpad tech that Apple introduced.

The display itself is clear and bright and I haven't had to strain my eyes at all to view anything. Video playback is clear and without stutters or artifacts, and the same goes for the audio, which is very high quality.

There are basic apps that come with the iPad - Calendar, picture viewer and editor, music player, web browser, map app and a few others. The App Store is easy to navigate and there are a huge number of apps and other products out there. I'll try and get round to reviewing some.

The battery lasts for ages, after about sixteen hours of use we'd used up 70% of the battery, this included listening to audio, watching video but mostly using apps created by our own developer.

If you have no other Mac products a wireless connection is required for almost everything. For instance you will not even be able to access iTunes without a wireless connection. You can still access your music through the 'music' tab in the dock however. With 64GB of memory available there's plenty of room for lots and lots of media, which is always a good thing.

Annoyingly if you download and apply an update to your ipad through a macbook or other mac platform it will remove your applications from the OS, and if you don't have a wireless connection there's no way of getting it back as you can't connect to the app store.

Connect it to a PC (Steve Jobs is spinning in his grave) and you can access one folder of pictures and that's about it.

There have been some rather punitive decisions taken regarding file management as well. Connecting the iPad to a Mac is done via iTunes, however you can only sync with one person's iTunes at any one time. Sync with another person's iTunes and you'll find that all the content from the previous iTunes is removed. This seems like a rather cynical attempt to get everyone to buy one iPad each.
When using an iPad professionally, for instance when you're trying to transfer files around an office you can't just plug it into someone's desktop Mac and transfer the files, you have to jump through all the synchronisation hoops and it ends up just annoying everyone.

This is probably the reason we're all going to have to start using this 'cloud' stuff that Apple are so keen on. I could write a word document on my iPad, but it would be hell trying to actually send it to anyone or indeed get it off the iPad even through iTunes, especially if they're on a PC. Much better I use my gmail documents to create a document online and then email it to everyone.

When you're using the iPad in the way Apple wants you to it's an excellent, gratifying experience. This involves creating an Apple ID, an iTunes ID if you don't already have one, and maintaining a constant wireless internet connection.
Sadly when you try and deviate from this or try to transfer files in a non-Apple approved way and you'll find you get shut down very quickly.

To summarise the iPad is a fantastic toy, it's become immediately popular in the design business as a method for displaying work. Just don't try and do any actual work on it.