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This afternoon Jeff gave me a demo of his iPad. An hour later Graham and I were proud new owners.
Damn that was an expensive lunch.
Never underestimate the power of a Jeff Rock Demo™.
It really is that big of a deal.
The screen is wonderful. Bright, vivid and dense. The viewing angle is more than acceptable but you will notice that the falloff point where it becomes dim is only about 20°. Not really an issue after you start your first 2-player game of Orbital, Flight Control or Scrabble with a friend; you won’t really notice or care.
Typing is arguably the iPad’s weakest point. In portrait it’s surprisingly annoying to use. Landscape mode is much better, but you’ll find that you have to hunt for characters and inadvertently tap the spacebar quite a bit. It will probably get easier after you have a few long posts under your belt. The addition of enhanced selection controls does help a lot although it makes me want system-wide define even more.
For some reason apps that are compiled as universal or for iPad specifically have a sharper icon. Maybe this is some kind of hint from Apple to devs to get crackin’.
Non-iPad native apps are pretty bad looking but functional if you need them. I expect you’ll hear much bitching about this for the rest of the year until it is remedied.
You’ll also hear from tech writers that it’s a device without a segment in a strange cannibalizing market. That happens often when a new segment gets created. In a year from now when the major hardware manufacturers get to market with knock-offs and Microsoft announces Windows Touch Series 1 Child Edition those people will probably not have jobs.
Apple’s apps are, as expected, wonderful. I won’t describe them here because a) the walk-throughs that Apple posted a week ago are very good descriptions and b) you need to use them to understand further just how great they really are. 3rd party apps are, as expected, pretty good. The ideas behind them are almost always great but the execution behind them is usually lacking. It can be attributed to rushing to market in just about every case. That said, many of the 3rd party apps are well done. The NPR app is a revelation and Plants vs. Zombies on iPad shames the other platforms the game is deployed on.
Safari is a thing of wonder. It’s so fast and capable. It’s so good that it made me think twice about the need for a native Tumblr iPad app (for reading anyway). If you doubt me go to the Apple Store and load your Dashboard on a demo unit. Other sites that are typically terrible on the iPhone version of Safari shine. Facebook. eBay. Basecamp. This is not the same Safari that you get on iPhone.
So what isn’t to like? I think the biggest oversight might be that there are no user profiles. This is not an iPod. It is meant to be personal, but at a minimum of $500 per unit I don’t think you’ll find too many households that pick up one iPad per family member, but each family member will want to do different things with it. Dad might want to check email but that doesn’t mean he wants little Sally bulk deleting messages to check out the animation (which is super-cool, by the way). Different music and photos are going to be an issue too. For an OS built on separate home folders it seems a rather obvious core feature to leave out. And then there’s always multitasking. I hate to even bring it up, but this device needs it very badly. To be clear, I don’t even really care about traditional multitasking. What I actually care about is backgrounding. A daemon process that lives in the internals and allows for the audio stream to keep playing, the file to keep downloading, the timer to keep firing or the posts to keep fetching. Yes, it gets heavy after holding it in the air, but you won’t be doing much of that. You’ll find a comfortable way to place it so that it is almost always resting.
Outside of those few things I’m extremely happy with what Apple has delivered here. Sure, everybody wants video iChat but that isn’t a necessity. Not this cycle anyway.
Lastly, I strongly encourage you to go use one in the store. Even if you think it’s dumb. Because you’re looking at the future of personal computing, even if you don’t buy this one from Apple and you buy the knock-off from HP and Microsoft in 2 years.
I’m sure I’ll have more impressions in the coming weeks but if you have any specific questions about the iPad feel free to ask.
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Finally had to break down and mock up an iPad. Unfortunately I had to print it in black and white because I was out of color ink (of course).
But that’s ok. I needed to get a better sense of the size and screen dimensions. This is definitely doing the trick.
