I recently picked up an iPad 2; ok, I actually stood in line for 4 hours to get one. Fantastic device. Steve Jobs was right in 1984, it just took him 16 years to realize the original vision for the Macintosh: The computer for the rest of us.

After hearing about it on Twit’s iPad today, I fired up the app Zite, which provides a newspaper/magazine style experience in reading articles linked in my twitter feed (and similar RSS feeds). What’s nice about it is that Zite gets through the often cryptic twitter messages that wrap the links to interesting articles. Instead, it brings those articles into a easily browsable iPad friendly format for easy review and reading. Additionally, it adds a TiVo-like rating system so you can specify what articles you like and which ones you don’t.

Although I haven’t used Zite all that long, the automatic categorization system seems to work well so far. I suspect that Zite will take the role of one of my primary news apps. I particularly like the sharing feature, although it’s a bit redundant to tweet about an article that I got via a twitter feed. Zite also avoids the duplication of articles, even when they are linked via different shortened URLs, which is relatively common given the twitter accounts I follow.

The only complaint I have so far is actually a feature request: add the ability to copy the entire article to my Evernote account. (Yes, I know about emailing into Evernote, but only the link gets emailed.)

A side note regarding the iPad 2: while using the iPad the evening after I got it, I noticed that the battery percentage dropped by 1% every few minutes. I thought to myself “the battery is going down really fast.” Of course, I realized after I did calculations that at the rate it was dropping, the battery would run out in … ten hours. Oh, right. Interesting how I perceived a rapid drop with the visible percentage count, versus I hardly notice the battery indicator on my iPhone ( where I’m not showing the percentage.)