Looking to buy an iPad while on vacation

[braddick]

If I purchase an iPad and I'm away from my home computer (with iTunes) will I be able to do much with it? Where I am staying offers WiFi. There's some downtime here and having an iPad would be terrific, if I can get it to work. Thanks!

 

[Mac'nCheese]

Pretty sure they can activate it in the apple store.

Yes they can: Buy iPad 2 at your favorite Apple Retail Store and we’ll help you set it up — free.

 

[rgarjr]

depends where u buy it at, if you get it from an apple store u can activate it there. Get it at Target or some third party retailer and u won't have access to iTunes.

 

[braddick]

There is no Apple store here, it's at a Radio Shack. I was hoping I could use the iTunes built into the iPad... Log in and under "purchases", download some apps... iBooks and such.

 

[kalex]

Not yet. For now you have to use computer to activate it. once ios5 comes out then you can do it right from ipad

 

[Bernard SG]

Wirelessly posted (IPod Touch 4: Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 4_3_5 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8L1 Safari/6533.18.5)

There is no Apple store here, it's at a Radio Shack. I was hoping I could use the iTunes built into the iPad... Log in and under "purchases", download some apps... iBooks and such.

You need to plug it in a computer for the very first power on. Apple stores and a lot of re-sellers can do it for you.
Once that is done, you can of course purchase everything you need from the device itself.