After all the hullaballoo of the iPad launch, JOHN HARRIS gets his hands on Apple's latest wonder device to ask what makes it of lasting value.

iPad fever has swept Australia during the past month, which begs the question why?

At first glance, the device looks like an iPhone on steroids, with a 9.7-inch touchscreen and a grid of shiny icons.

A major difference between an iPhone and an iPad is that Apple’s new wonder device doesn’t make phone calls.

While iPad technology – touchscreen controls, web access, modular applications – is evolutionary, the experience of using it is quite revolutionary.

So why shell out from $649 for the WiFi-only 16-gigabyte version, to $1049 for the 3G-capable 64GB model?

My idiosyncratic answer is that the iPad makes three of my favourite pastimes easier: Reading books, perusing newspapers and listening to the radio.

My current yarn is Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a lovely little tale that occupies 1452 pages of tiny type, which because of my underpowered eyesight, I read with a handheld magnifier.

That’s until the iPad arrived with its built-in ebook reader, called iBooks, which invokes an onscreen bookshelf.

A Store button on the top left of the “bookshelf” accesses a range of free texts, including a pedestrian translation of War and Peace. Apple is yet to announce if it will be possible to buy bestsellers at its iBookstore.

Once downloaded to the iPad’s bookshelf, the book opens on-screen like a real volume in either single-page portrait view or two-page landscape view.

The iPad’s backlit colour screen, with simple brightness controls, makes it easy to read in any environment, even a darkened bus coming home from a dismal football game.

Best of all, it’s possible to set a book’s on-screen font to any style or size, which allows me to scale the text of War and Peace so I can read it without a magnifier – although admittedly it blows out the book’s size to 8643 pages (imagine carrying that around in a backpack!).

The iPad is also a convenient way to read a range of newspapers, included abridged versions of venerable journals such as the Australian, the Financial Times and New York Times.

The iPad makes it a breeze to flick through top stories from major papers each morning without leaving a stack of dead tree fibre on the coffee table.

Like the iPhone, downloadable programs are a strength of the iPad, such as a free app from our 15-cent-a-day ABC, which delivers easy access to Aunty’s online treasures.

Choosing its Radio icon allows on-demand access to stories from ABC programs including Radio National stalwarts such as Mornings, AM and PM plus new digital radio content such as ABC Country.

The iPad also offers seamless access to YouTube videos, which I discovered by tracking down Emmylou Harris (sigh) singing Boulder to Birmingham and James Lee Burke reflecting on Hurricane Katrina.

However, my favourite iPad experience was showing my six-year-old son a video of Keith Woodley’s anthemic I Am Australian: With straight back, smiling face and hand gestures, my little guy started singing along.

That immediacy is what makes the iPad really sing.

John Harris is managing director of Impress Media Australia. Email jharris@impress.com.au

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