I’ve had this thing in my grubby little paws since just before 9am, so it’s probably time to share some of my first-day impressions.
- The iPad is quite a bit heavier than I expected. It weighs in at 1.5 lbs (roughly twice what my wife’s Nook weighs), which is enough to fatigue your hands or wrists if you try to hold it for any substantial amount of time. Holding it with one hand can be difficult, due both to its size and weight. It really seems to be designed to hold in both hands or propped against something like your lap or the arm of a chair.
- There weren’t any headphones in the box, which is kind of obnoxious. For $499, you figure those would be included.
- The screen is absolutely phenomenal. It’s razor-sharp, blindingly bright at its max setting, and readable at all viewing angles.
- Media files sync to the iPad a lot faster than they do to the iPhone or the iPod touch. I suspect that the Apple A4 SoC is the primary culprit here.
- Speaking of the A4, this thing is fast. It absolutely leaves my iPhone in the dust.
- All of the Twitter apps suck. Come on, Tweetie. Get with it.
- All of the built-in apps have been rebuilt to take advantage of the iPad’s speed and size. The Calendar app is the most improved, in my opinion, but all of the apps are significantly improved over their iPhone counterparts. The iPod app is missing the Cover Flow interface, which is kind of peculiar.
- If you hold the “Volume Down” button for more than a few clicks, it automatically jumps to the “Mute” position. I’m not sure if I like that, but it’s an interesting peek into some of the thought and care that went into building this device. (The iPhone doesn’t have a similar behavior.)
- John Gruber tweeted, “Running iPhone apps on your iPad is like driving your new BMW on the sidewalk.” I completely agree.
- The iBooks app came with a free copy of Winnie-the-Pooh, which was a nice surprise. The app itself is pretty slick, but I don’t see it beating the Kindle or Nook at the e-book game. Anyone who is serious about reading e-books will go with an e-ink screen. That said, this will probably be huge with parents who are reading to their kids and teaching them to read.
- After a day of hands-on experience, the iPad feels less like “a big iPhone” than the iPhone feels like “a small iPad”. That’s sort of obtuse, but I haven’t come up with a better way to say it. After using the iPad for a few hours, then picking up my iPhone to make a phone call, the iPhone felt smaller and more cramped. Comparatively, the iPad felt quite natural (rather than “expansive” or “spread out”) when I first picked it up.
- The new keyboard has a bit of a learning curve, but I’m getting used to it. I can easily see that some people will strongly dislike it and never quite get used to it. I can’t help but wonder if that’s why the iPad ships with support for Bluetooth keyboard and has an optional keyboard dock available.
Overall, I’m pretty happy with the iPad so far. It really is a new type of device, standing somewhere between a smartphone and a laptop.
It differs from previous efforts at tablet-style computers in one important way: almost all of its predecessors are trying to use existing operating systems to run existing software with some bolted-on touch interface. For whatever reason, that simply hasn’t worked.
This isn’t a Mac. It isn’t a PC. It runs the iPhone OS, but it’s not an iPhone. It’s a new device, with new goals and new ways of thinking. It’s certainly not for everyone, but I think that Apple is onto something with the iPad. This may not be the future of common computing, but a lot of the ideas and paradigms on the iPad (and the iPhone, for that matter) are here to stay.
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