Apple didn’t really sell this point, but it’s the single biggest benefit of the iPad: speed. It feels at least a generation faster than the iPhone 3GS. Lags and waits are gone, and the OS and apps respond just as quickly as you’d hope. Rotating between portrait and landscape modes, especially, is where this new horsepower manifests in the OS.
Build
Imagine, if you will, a super light unibody MacBook Pro that’s smaller, thinner and way, way, way lighter. Or, from a slightly different perspective, think about a bigger iPhone that’s been built with unibody construction. The iPad really does feel like some amalgamation of these two product lines from Apple. And, in the hands, it feels great – not too heavy at all.
The screen looked nice, and it’s able to display even small text crisply. Touch responds like a dream.
But one point of the build seems odd. It’s the Home button. In portrait mode, hitting the Home button is far less natural than on an iPhone because your thumbs naturally rest in the middle of each side of the case (not the bottom). A Kindle-like side Home button may not have been a horrible idea, even if it broke up the stoic minimalism of the case a bit.
iBooks
It’s an optical illusion, but just seeing the depth of pages makes the iBook app feel more like a book than a Kindle ever did for me. The text is sharp, and while the screen is bright, it doesn’t seem to strains the eyes – but time will tell on that.
Keyboard
Typing in portrait is better than anticipated but still quite a stretch for our average-sized hands, which means that letters like F G and H will take a moderate conditioning for some. What about in landscape mode, sitting flat on the table? Well this is problematic too, as the iPad sort of wobbles. The back is not perfectly flat, meaning your typing surface is never perfectly flat, so the virtual keyboard becomes that much more difficult to use.
Pictures
Pinch, zoom, whatever – like we said, it’s fast – the photo app is faster than iPhoto performs on an aging Core2Duo laptop.
Apps
Apps can play in their native resolution, or be 2x uprezzed for the screen. How does it look? An ATV game we tried actually looked pretty good – limited more by its base polygon count than the scaling process itself. Bottom line: it’s about as elegant solution as Apple could have offered, even if that graphics won’t be razor sharp.
Browsing
Over Wi-Fi, Gizmodo loaded quickly. The 9.7-inch screen is an excellent size for reading the site. You can pinch zoom, but you won’t need to. Of course, on such a pretty web browsing experience, not having Flash makes the big, empty video boxes in the middle of a page is pretty disappointing. Put differently, the fatal flaw of Apple’s mobile browser has never been more apparent.
David
Thursday, January 28, 2010 at 8:22 AMI think the iPad is an interesting proposition to a mac person contemplating a move to a netbook. However, having recently purchased a Macbook for school, I am not disappointed that I didn’t wait. The iPad simply cannot do the same job as a computer. It cannot have my camera plugged in, it, as far as I have read, does not have the capabilities of iPhoto. On a personal note, I can not imagine it replacing my iPod Touch, as I want a portable music player. I simply can’t have the iPad in my pocket while running, and I can’t sneakily play Doodle Jump during maths class with an iPad. I do however, see it’s purpose in the E-Reader market. However, it will be almost twice the price of the KIndle!!! I think apple should have been more specific about it’s purpose.
Cam
Thursday, January 28, 2010 at 9:24 AMI can see the market for this device. My wife reluctantly accepted an iphone (and took a leap into the information age) when her old SE died, and now she does everything from the iphone (including reading books either saved as pdf files or from the web). The problem around home is that writing emails and surfing the net is not a fun experience on such a small screen. A netbook would solve these problems, though the screen is a bit small and the things which work well on the iphone require a heavy browser/OS behind it to make it work. The ipad is still cheap, is something which I can use on the couch, and also has the ability to read online books.
My only criticism of the device is the screen resolution, I would have liked something a bit higher/denser (pixel count is low for screen size, something to do with power saving no doubt), so that web browsing, and in particular photos and videos could be shown at a higher resolution. Still, I will wait and see, no doubt it still looks fantastic.
Oh, and what’s the bet that the 30-pin dongles will be compatible with this/the next iphone?
Darius
Thursday, January 28, 2010 at 9:49 AMNo multitasking (even like a spaces sort of gig) make it a very fancy ipod touch with 3g
thanks but no thanks
Dan
Thursday, January 28, 2010 at 12:18 PMShould be interesting, i think for high-end users this would not fit their use, however for someone who travels, only realy does email, etc would actually be useful, more function than the iphone, without the heft of a laptop. i could see some moving to an iMac at home and just having this for the road.
The UI really appeals interms of improvements to the calender and contacts, i have seen a comment made on similarities to the Courier concept, i think there is room for that to be jumped on by a developer, it will certainly have the grunt to do it.
As i said before this wont appeal to high end users, i think apple has spent a lot of effort making sure that the iPhone OS – to some extent – suits the low end users, which is why it is so successful. This makes lots of sense from a business case, as they are targeting the meat of the market, would multitaking be great, for those who dont really need it the multitasking it does offer – on the core services (ipod, mail,) – is exactly what the average user needs.