Ok I cracked. I broke my first New Year’s resolution within three days. A record even for me. I bought the Mac Air. Super fast. Awesome light. Sexy as hell. For some reason, it makes me think of Cher but more of her later.

So the first question I am asked now is, what about your iPad? Wasn’t it meant to be your lightweight portable computer? Yes, that was the idea, duh but all ideas evolve and change shape along the way.

Perhaps it’s me and not the iPad – a bad carpenter always blames her tools – but I can’t seem to do any serious work on it. I used it to make one serious business presentation and since I have yet to hear back from the client, well, maybe it wasn’t serious enough.

I use it mostly to play games – Ghost Radar Classics is my latest favourite app, it tells you if there are ghosts around you, very useful if you want to feel less lonely. The friend, who introduced it to me, used it at a wake and found lots of strong “ghostly” signals and is thus convinced it works. We later deployed the ghost radar at a shopping mall and also found activity.

I also used it in a hotel’s public area and also picked up signals and I’ve been advised by my friends not to use it in hotel bedrooms if I am alone. I reckon the ghost radar would go into over-drive at most hotels. I will let you know the results after I check into the Park Hyatt Dubai this evening.

Talking Tom is an app introduced to me by an eight-year-old girl from Ireland – cute cat who is parrot and punching bag in one, Talking Tom, not Lucy . When not playing Talking Tom, Lucy spends a lot of time on Wikipedia and she is the most knowledgeable kid I know.

Wiki is the place she goes to for answers when her mother doesn’t have answers for all the questions she has about life, and things. Her mother is very grateful to Jimmy Wales for creating Wikipedia, which is, by the way, two years older than Lucy.

She taught me everything I know about the Hope diamond and she believes that the only things that can give you happiness are families and friends, not money or gadgets even though she got the iPad for Christmas.

I also play Scrabble and all kinds of word games and am enriching my vocabulary everyday. Playing against the CPU is an extraordinary experience – he (for some reason, I think of it as a male) knows more words than I knew there were words.

What else do I do on the iPad? I check emails occasionally (my Blackberry is the workhorse for emails); I surf the Web when I am bored and sitting in a taxi or waiting for something or someone and oh yes, I take notes with it. I find I am using fewer and fewer paper notebooks.

I tried reading on it but didn’t take to it like I have to the Kindle. Which is why I am curious as to whether Rupert Murdoch’s attempts to save the newspaper business by publishing an iPad-only version of “The Daily” will work? I sure hope it does because journalism needs a White Knight, just that I don’t see Murdoch as one. Steve Jobs? Hmm, maybe …
I don’t read magazines either on the iPad. I bought one issue of Vanity Fair and gave up. I bought one edition of Wired and stopped.

I think it’s a state of mind thing. We like new things, we try them out and we fall out of love with them. We’ve always done that as humans. We do it with bars, restaurants, artistes, friendships, relationships – just that perhaps, in Gadget Culture, our flirtations are more exaggerated and more instant.

I am currently flirting with foursquare but I am not sure it enriches my life to find out where my friends are at any point of the day. I think this is a network created by parents to track their kids and governments to track people.

Speaking of which, I have met parents who have bought their kids smartphones and installed a secret location-based app so that they can see “if they are where they say they are”. I have also met husbands who, when they travel, install video cameras at home so they can see what their wives and kids are up to at home., every minute of the day.

I know all this is being done in the name of love but does love have to be so transparent like Cher’s dresses – check out the dress she wore to the premiere of Burlesque in picture above?

My Air, by the way, is lighter than Cher.