Kindle vs iPad for reading books,magazines,newspapers,reference&illustrated materials

For more than a decade, nobody, not even a deep-pocketed company like Microsoft, has successfully cracked the tablet market. Apple, based on the tests over several days, is likely to be the first. The first iPad is a winner. It stacks up as a formidable electronic-reader rival for Amazon's Kindle.

The half-inch-thick, magazine-size iPad is thin and, at 1.5 pounds, light with a gorgeous, glossy, backlit 9.7-inch multitouch display. The fingerprint-resistant screen has an exceptionally wide viewing sweet spot for a movie and is terrific for showing off most of a Web page. The device resembles an iPhone on growth hormones. It shares many of the smaller handheld's design elements, down to the lone home button below the display. As on the iPhone, you can have up to 11 screens of icons.

iPad has the same kind of smart sensors that change the orientation of the screen from portrait to landscape, depending on how it's rotated. (It's always right side up.) And, like the iPhone, it takes its cue from your fingers, whether you pinch to zoom in or out on Web pages, location-based maps and pictures — or flick to scroll up or down a page. You can easily search across all content.

The iPad's splendor and power may be best shown by The Elements: A Visual Exploration The $13.99 program is more electronic book than traditional app, but it's not like any e-book you've seen. The periodic table of elements comes to life when you touch your finger against any element. Handsome photographs of objects spin around so you can observe them from all vantage points.

The iPad is not so much about what you can do — browse, do e-mail, play games, read e-books and more — but how you can do it. That's where Apple is rewriting the rulebook for mainstream computing. There is no mouse or physical keyboard. Everything is based on touch. All programs arrive directly through Apple's App Store. Apple's tablet is fun, simple, stunning to look at and blazingly fast. Inside is a new Apple chip, the A4.

The iPad has built-in notes, calendar and contacts applications, and Apple sells slick, redesigned versions of its iWork productivity applications — $10 each for the Keynote presentation program, the Pages word processor and the Numbers spreadsheet. Still, for most folks, the iPad is more about consuming content than creating it.