ipad or not to ipad?

[gdeiu89]

I am a first year at Umass Amherst. I was wondering if anyone in the life sciences has an ipad, and if so how useful you find it? Do you find uses for it in or around the lab either for papers or taking notes? Or does your lab computer do the job of an ipad just as well? I was considering getting one in order to help me keep information at my fingertips, but if its overrated, then I wont waste my time or money.

[Eigen]

I'm in biological chemistry, and I enjoy mine.

I don't find it absolutely necessary, but it's nice to have my entire library of papers with me on the go, and being able to easily annotate them and sync them back to my desktop.

It's not a replacement for a desktop or a laptop (or both), but it's a very useful portable device.

I don't use mine much around the lab, or for notes- I prefer data and ideas in hardcopy, non-crashable formats. I use mine for storing papers, books, grants, etc. It's a more robust e-reader with some other nice connectivity features. I also find it useful for marking up/editing manuscripts I'm working on, as opposed to printing them out and going after it with a red pen. Some things are just a bit easier to read and markup that way as opposed to tracking changes in Word.

I did toy around with it as an electronic lab notebook, and it worked fine- I just prefer an actual lab notebook.