After my intial "iPads are a rubbish idea" reaction I have to admit I rather fancy one. I took a test drive recently, watched a bit of movie with the grand kids, reviewed some photos yadda yadda. I instantly converted from *pointless* to *want one*. But here's where things get a bit complicated. Recently I jumped ship — switching from iPhone to HTC Desire — and I have to say with no reservations it works for me! So, how about an Android powered tablet? They're out there but they're not the finished article, positively clunky in fact when compared to iPad. The same is true of the HTC by-the-way in a less critical and therefore OK kind of way. The user interface looks unsophisticated, a bit slung together, compared to iPhone. But that's OK because I'm not tied to iTunes. This is where complicated decisions get a little simpler; no iTunes means no *walled garden* of applications and that means freedom. Apple sales and major league fans will claim iTunes provides safety by preventing undesirable applications from being installed on your phone. True to some extent, but not the complete picture. Simple selection criteria will guide you to a similar outcome when choosing Android apps: avoid the frivilous, avoid all vices, stick to official apps from Google, Twitter, Facebook etc. Boring equals safe. So far then, I've swapped iPhone for Android, celebrated my departure from iTunes and promptly got Toys Fever for iPad.

The real decision

Having decided I'd rather like an iPad I then started to reason on why? What would I do with it? After all, I'd choose laptop over iPad on most occasions and on most occasions I'm not that far from the laptop. If I were out-and-about I'd be happy with the Android handset. This internal left-right-brain ping-pong went on for some time until work colleague and trusted advisor Joel Williams (@tentonipete) showed me his Kindle. Unobtrusive, easy to use, the *print* looks amazing and is therefore very easy to read. It's very cool. And here's the deal. For what I want it's perfect. I do lot's of reading for research, that's for the planning part of my job. I frequently use quotations from my favourite books in presentations. It all fits. I don't need an iPad, I need a Kindle. I can fill it with all my books, add annotations and even tweet these if I want. It does mean re-buying all my books and you should check they're available on Kindle. For example, The Cluetrain Manifesto is not — aaaaaahhh! So that means carrying 1 book and 1 kindle.

Well kept secret

Here's the extraordinary discovery. Kindle comes in 2 versions: Kindle with Wi-Fi and Kindle with Wi-Fi and 3G. Option 1 £109, option 2 £149. I chose option 2 thinking I would sort the mobile contract one day if I really needed to. NEWS FLASH: no need for contract. The Kindle came from Amazon, next day, pre-configured with my account details and 3G already enabled. The 3G is FREE, FOREVER. Books arrive in an instant — only ever from Amazon and therefore not unlike iTunes in that respect but hey, I only ever purchase new books from Amazon. I can also tweet comments to Twitter and Facebook if I opt to.

iPad or Kindle? Depends what you want I suppose, for me: Kindle.