Heated debate: It may be crazy powerful and magical, but is iPad worth the money?

With iPad sales storming ahead in the US, and availability about to open up in another nine countries including the UK on May 28, we got two of Pocket Gamer's finest to debate whether it was worth buying.

News editor Mark Brown's already got his iPad pre-ordered, while mobile news hound Will Wilson is yet to be convinced.

Let the debate begin.

Mark Brown: So Will, iPad pre-orders are open, the device ships before the month is out. Being an esteemed colleague and a member of the Pocket Gamer alliance, I assume you pressed the "add to cart" button at 1 minute past midnight on the 10th, right?

Will Wilson: Not exactly. I held my iPod touch close to my face instead. Saved me a good few hundred pounds in the process and it's available right now. It's truly magical.

Mark Brown: Well, that's the common joke I know, but I think there's more to the iPad than adding a few inches and a few hundred pixels to the display. Not that there's anything wrong with that - the iPod user interface and experience is almost perfect.

I know a lot of people have that moment of clarity after wrangling with dodgy interfaces and annoying handsets for so long, to get an iPhone and just have a device that simply "works". (Jeez, I don't want to come across as some fanboyish Apple evangelist, because god knows I'm not one.) But I'm looking forward to getting something like a laptop, with that iPodesque experience.

Will Wilson: But the user interface is identical to the iPhone's. A good interface, sure, but I don't see why I should have to pay £400 again for the privilege, especially considering that, as far as features go, the iPad actually does less than the existing device.

If the iPhone was a convergence of many electronic devices - a phone, gaming machine etc - into one smooth electronic highway, then the iPad is the backwater bypass of technology.

Only with a hefty tollboth at the entrance ramp.

Mark Brown: I think the size of the device, and the size of the screen more importantly, hold the key. The iPhone is restricted in a lot of the things it can do, and the way you interact with it, thanks to its diminutive little display.

Experiences like books, comics and videos seem simply silly on the iPhone because there's not enough real estate, but on the iPad's 10-inch screen, apps like Marvel Comics and Netflix make a lot of sense

In terms of gaming, we haven't even scratched the surface, simply because the device is only a month old. Taking a 320 x 480 resolution game and bowing it up to over a thousand pixels, like Angry Birds, isn't very sensible. But the genres and gameplay styles the iPad could hold in the future, will definitely give the device more of an easy sell.

I mean, you can chuck this thing down and play it like a board game, control it with an iPhone, it's got 11 points of touch. Gaming's never seen a screen like this before. It's either been giant TVs in the living room or little handhelds. No there's this thing inbetween.

Are you not excited to see what the iPad might hold for gaming?

Will Wilson: The future on gaming for the iPad is restricted by the very construction of the device. You don't see people play on a TV unless it's got a console and a controller attached because it's unwieldy. The same thing applies to the iPad.

The increased resolution and sharing gaming space for multiplay appears to be a great draw at first glance, but the interface for solo play is sorely lacking because it's almost impossible to find that 'perfect' holding position for the damn thing!

Do I rest it on against my knee in a painful sitting position? Grip it with both hands, which leaves my (massive) thumbs stretching painfully to control everything? Or do I just go back to the more handheld device of the iPhone and iPod touch?

Even given its increased size, it's still a hard stretch to get more than two people around the device - 10 inches just isn't big enough for any more players' grubby fingers to be poking at.

What sort of games can I imagine on the iPad? Just casual, throwaway titles with higher resolutions, three times the price of the iPhone equivalent.

I mean, other than board games, what other games would the iPad be more suited to than the standard iPhone? Racing - can't hold comfortably. Platform - can't hold comfortably. Angry Birds - Okay, that uses one finger to control leaving the other hand to hold it, so I'll let that pass.

Mark Brown: I don't know what types of games. I'm not a game designer! But thinking of genres in such a reductive way isn't particularly helpful.

Asked the same question before the iPhone came out - what genres could possibly work on a device with no buttons, and if you said platformers, racers, FPS etc will not work on the iPhone, you would be mostly right. A lot of those games don't work very well.

But you'd be missing things like Flight Control, Hook Champ, Eliss, Zen Bound and Angry Birds, plus Line drawing, physics puzzlers, multi-touched based experiences.

New hardware breeds new genres. I can't think of much that I can do on Project Natal either, but last I checked, Microsoft's still bringing that thing out.

The iPad is really in its early days, and I agree that there isn't much to see gaming wise on the platform so far, but it will only take one iPad-version of Doodle Jump or Flight Control to get people excited

Will Wilson: But Doodle Jump and Flight Control are based on the two genuinely new features that the iPhone brought to gaming - accelerometer controls and exclusive touchscreen controls (something partially pioneered by Nintendo in the first place anyway)

There isn't anything genuinely new about the iPad other than 'it's bigger'. You don't get innovation from just simply making things bigger, you get it through changing the way the game is played.

Natal uses full-body motion control, the Wii uses infra-red motion controls, Move does something similar but with a big shiny ball on the end. These are control-based innovations that have and will shape the games that come out for the systems.

The iPad is clumsier to control than the iPhone, so unless you want to lay it down on the table (something you can do with the iPhone and DS, too) it offers nothing to push forward gaming.

All we'll see is iPhone games remade for a bigger screen at a bigger price to match the bigger hole in your wallet.

Mark Brown: I think you're wrong. New genres are naturally going to emerge, and when they do, you'll be begging for a weekend loan. Will Wilson: Dream on. You'll be begging me to buy you a drink because I'll be £440 richer than you.