Without a doubt, the whole world of IT and consumer electronics was taken by storm when Apple released its already super-famous iPad multimedia tablet back in late January. I mean, even before making its way onto the market, the device was regarded as some sort of “holy grail” of convergence technologies, being able to deliver a very large number of features and functions by taking the Cupertino-based company's whole App-based ecosystem to a whole-new level.

Naturally, after the first iPad models made their way into the eagerly waiting hands of consumers, things got even better for Apple, the hype around the device growing, despite of its inherent problems (most of which are related to the lack of support for Adobe's Flash and the lower battery life). I mean, the thing really sold like hot cakes, whether we're talking about the basic Wi-Fi or the more advanced Wi-Fi + 3G version.

And since we're on this subject, we'll have to mention that we were lucky enough to get our hands on the latter iPad flavor mentioned above only a couple of weeks after the tablet managed to finally make its way into stores, thus being able to see for ourselves whether there was really some substance to the iPad or we were talking just about fanboy-induced hype. The answer, as you'll be able to see throughout our review, lays somewhere in the middle.

As you might expect, the experience delivered by the iPad Wi-Fi + 3G, which we'll try to reproduce for you to the best of our abilities, will probably get a lot better in the future, as Apple unlocks further levels of functionality via firmware updates and more apps become available. In fact, as in the case of the iPhone, we're pretty sure that the huge variety of applications, as well as the fast and easy access to multimedia content and the Internet are going to push even further the iPad's popularity, perhaps trampling quite a lot of competitors in its path.