In keeping with the precedent established in previous "30 Days With..." series, I devoted yesterday's post to detailing my . Today is dedicated to the counter point of view--a list of my favorite things about the iPad from my journey.

The iPad has an advantage over previous 30 Days projects ( and ) because I was already familiar with it before I began. While I was essentially new to both Google Docs, and Ubuntu Linux, I have had an iPad since the first day it was available. The challenge for the 30 Days, though, was to shift from using it as an accessory or complementary gadget, and instead rely on it as the sole computing platform.

There were, of course, some bumps along the way, but there are also a few things that I truly appreciated about using the iPad instead of my notebook. Without further ado, here is my list of the five things I like most about the iPad:

1. Size. Size does matter. And when you're talking about lugging a device around all over town, the smaller the better...to a point. Carting a 15-inch notebook, or maybe one of those laptops with dual 17-inch displays, may provide more of a portable computing workhorse, but then we get into a semantic debate about defining "portable".

On the other end of the spectrum, you could argue that the iPhone (or an Android or Windows Phone 7 smartphone) are even more compact and portable, or make a case for smaller tablets like the .