Today has been an experiment. Since I left my laptop charger at home at the beginning of the week, I’ve been working using my new iPad2.

Ever since I spent 45 minutes queuing to get my hands on one (paying what one of my friends described as the Apple Tax) I’ve been eager to test it out in the “real” world.

So, today I’ve been travelling to London and I’ve used it to type an article on the train using the iPad version of the word processing program, Pages, I’ve also used it to take notes in a presentation using Evernote and now I’m typing this article directly into WordPress.

To be honest, I’m stunned. I had thought it would be a large version of the iPhone 4 (but without the phone) and in fairness it is, but for the same reasons I love and loathe the iPhone 4, I’m loving the iPad’s screen clarity and brightness and the much larger keyboard. Battery life seems good, especially on standby, although it seemed to take a while to charge.

I went for the ‘basic’ 16gb Wifi model, whilst I would like to say this was out of choice, it was all they had left! I had originally planned to have the 3G version, but then I read about “tethering” and creating a personal wifi “hotspot” on my iPhone. Not only does this reduce the purchase price by £100 it also avoids having to have a separate contract or pay as you go sim card with a mobile provider. My network provider makes a small extra monthly charge for this capability, but it’s worth it for the convenience.

When I set up my IPad up I decided not to synchronise my iTunes library and my iPhoto library for the simple reason I couldn’t see myself needing my content in 3 places (laptop, iPhone, iPad), but obviously that’s a personal choice. One thing I did find though is that you can’t sync your content on your iPhone to the iPad without syncing the iPad to iTunes on the laptop. However I have bought the App Photosync which can sync photos directly between devices. If you are on the move and want to send pictures from your phone quickly, then this could be well worth purchasing, as sometimes it’s much better to show images on the bigger screen.

This is the first time I’ve used the personal hotspot and setting it up couldn’t be easier. Simply turn on the “personal hotspot” on in the phone, connect to the wifi connection on the iPad’s settings menu and key in the password. It just works and seems to be power friendly to both devices too.

Could it replace the laptop?

For some people it probably can day to day. A lot of the stuff that you might want to use a laptop for you can do quite easily on an iPad and if you’re travelling, it’s certainly a lot lighter to carry about and way cooler than a netbook.

So far, so good.

What’s your experience of working with an iPad?