Ok, so despite the fact I wrote about the build up to the iPad I still have yet to post my thoughts now that it is out and I have been fiddling with one since day one of the wifi only release.
Short Version ?
There is good reason Apple has moved more than 3 million iPads since they hit stores about 3 months ago. Is it perfect ? In a word... No. But it is a much better 1st generation device than the original iPhone. And it is a revolutionary rather than evolutionary device... no matter how much it looks like a big iPhone/Touch. If you are a geek then you either have one, are saving for one, or aloofly awaiting the chrome/android alternative. For other folks you can read on... or just go to an apple store and play with it for 10-15 minutes. If you don’t want one after that then you are probably immune... for now. I stood at the table on day one for close to an hour either playing with a device or waiting for another turn... not because I needed more time but because I was absolutely fascinated to listen to the non geek masses as they encountered it for the first time (probably about 60-75% of the folks in the store). To say it sold itself is like saying Crack cocaine is a little addictive. People who had no idea what it was went from clueless to opening wallets in about 3-5 minutes.
So before I get to my typical “The Good, The So So and The Bad” routine I do want to address the second question everyone seems to ask. The first is “Do you like it”, the second is “So what is it good for?” or in other words “Why should I drop $500-800 dollars on it?”. The thing is I am not sure there are some golden light, angels singing, clear cut easy to explain answers to that but here is the best I have. It is the new way for the everyman to use computers. Apple has successfully domesticated the silicon beast that is the modern PC. Windows, Linux and yes even Mac OS X systems are wolves, boars and wildebeest. iOS devices are Dogs, Pigs and Cattle. Instead of being afraid of them or wrestling with them etc... you use them, no muss no fuss. As for what kind of impact that will bring. I really think the iPad is to the PC what the PC was to the Mainframe. While the ultimate winner of this revolution may not be an apple device... I think this style of device is very much here to stay. You can get on board now or wait but I am pretty confident that in as few as 5 years most will have a hard time remembering when they didn’t have a device like this.
* note to self... remember to check in 5 years to see just how stupid that prediction sounded*
The Good:
You know the BASF slogan “BASF doesn’t make a lot of the products you use, BASF makes a lot of the products you use better”? Well, the iPad is like that for some staple computing tasks. It didn’t make the web browser but having an SVGA resolution LED backlit IPS highly responsive capacitive touch screen device weighing in a 1.5 pounds and running 9 hours in between having to recharge makes a web browser better. No more awkward laptops on couches, no squinting at tiny mobile device screens. Just the web in your hands and no need for wires every 10 minutes to keep the beast alive. Complain its nothing new all you want but just relax in your favorite comfy place with one for 5 minutes and I think you will “Get It”. All you folks screaming about flash just be quiet... we will get to that later. Same song different verse for E-mail, calendar, contacts etc... Mouse traps have been built, but Apple generally makes the better ones. This is the meat of the value of the device.
The iPad didn’t make your digital pictures... it makes having digital pictures better. Come on I know you all have struggled with this one. You buy that 2000 megapixel whosamawhatchamacalit supper zoom auto everything camera and take approximately 2 bazzillion images with it in bora bora or what have you... only to find you have a problem. Quality photo printouts are still damn expensive in any kind of volume so you probably don’t do more than a few big ones. The tiny printout pocket size do not do your mega zoom high resolution images much good and dragging out the laptop to view pictures has become the modern day ‘home movie’ projector PITA. Digital still frames are lousy screens with pitiful browsing options and the list goes on. Enter iPad. Large handheld screen, zoom, rotate and swipe your way through hundreds of images with nary a problem. 4 year olds pick it up in 2 seconds, grandparents can see them all in 9.7 inch glory etc... I swear for some folks an iPad could simply be the replacement for photo albums. Seriously. For the number of images you can store per dollar spent I would say it would be a heck of a lot more cost effective to just buy a new iPad when you need more space for additional albums. Currently the image management software is a little light weight for this option but it is something I think will mature in the years to come. It is quite effective even as it is. One thing apple does need to sort out is better support for larger file sizes... as is iTunes syncing likes to re-size the images for optimum iPad viewing. If you keep it at full quality that is perfectly fine as the loss of resolution is simply not visible. But for zooming in on details it quickly shows its weaknesses. You can dump them in un resized but much above 3 - 5 megapixels you can start to make the application pretty unstable.
Somewhat similar to picture viewing is document viewing. Now I will get to the shortcomings of document viewing (end especially editing) on this device in a bit. But first the good news. If you simply need easy access to information at your fingertips then you can store quite a bit of info on the iPad. Unfortunately this is perhaps the worst supported capability in the native iPad software. In order for this to fall into the ‘good’ category you need the Apple office programs or something like Docs to Go. If you are going to use the iPad in a professional setting with fast changing word docs, power point presentations and spread sheets flying around then research the various applications for viewing those types of documents and make a choice... heck download them all. It will be worth it to find the one that works for you. The payoff? NEVER having to deal with the dreaded “PC Load Letter” msg of doom from the local printer. Well maybe not forever... after all you likely will still on occasion have to provide multiple copies for the unenlightened. There are still warts in this area but even with the problems this is a pretty killer app for a large segment of folks. Microsoft has a huge ‘in’ here if they want to own an important use case for these kinds of devices if they can pull themselves together enough to exploit it. If I were Xerox or another big printer company I would be looking very nervously at a tablet form factor finally becoming viable. If Apple moves to a retina level display on the iPad sell stock in any company that relies on printers in the standard letter print out size (ie most of them).
Touch and accelerometer games are still coming into their own but this is an excellent platform for them. From something as simple as chess, to the classic Labyrinth, to the full on RPG or FPS type games the iPad is a very capable performer.
Mobile video. This one surprised me. Store some movies/TV shows etc on this device and you have the best ever in flight entertainment (or child distraction) system at your fingertips and thats without considering books, games or other programs. Netflix streaming from wifi or 3g is surprisingly satisfying. ABC content is also available and Hulu just made its appearance.
The Battery life is actually as good as advertised. Not sure if its worth the lack of flash... but it is a pleasant surprise to not have to divide the advertised run time by 2 when faced with real life use. Don’t believe me? When powered on for the first time I had it plugged into the USB port long enough to sync up all my files and then I ran for the next 10 hours doing anything and everything I wanted with the device before I got the red 20% left warning. With airplane mode on I flew from Munich to D.C. watching movies or playing games (7+ hours) and didn’t get below half battery life. 3G is consistently about 1 hour shorter when utilizing the 3G radio the entire time. Full brightness can reduce it maybe another hour (so 6ish under absolute worse case)... but in most uses I rarely even want the screen above about half brightness. 3G is a necessary evil when out of wifi reach.
Touch screen responsiveness. I passed on the first two generations of the iPhone even while swearing at my numb resistive touch screen HTC phones. The responsiveness of the 3g finally swayed me from the qwerty slider HTC world and the 3Gs cemented my conversion to the way of Cupertino mobile devoutness. The iPad blows the 3Gs out of the water while showing more than double the display information. This is the cornerstone of a touch device and nobody currently does it better than Apple.
E-reader. I read somewhere north of 20k pages a year and love my Kindle 2... but the iPad is now my primary reading device. Eye comfort is not quite as good as E-ink (and certainly not printed material) but it is good enough. This is not a laptop and if you judge your comfort reading on a screen by experience with long tracts of text on a laptop it is not directly comparable... mostly because of the same problems I have below with glare also make it a better reading solution when away from a glare source. It is quite capable of disappearing in your hands and while the battery won’t last you multiple day chewing sessions like the Kindle... it is sufficient to pretty much any single days chores.
The design. Glass and metal destroys the more typical varying grades of plastic so ever present in pretty much any other mobile device design.
The So So:
Storage space. Apple and their damned insistence to not provide for user added storage on their mobile devices. If you are not a geek addict that has to buy the latest and greatest devices (IE you will refresh regularly) and you can afford an iPad then you can afford to get the most memory available. In either line the difference is 200 dollars between 16 and 64Gb... is it to much to pay for 50 some odd Gb of storage ? Yes... and you should still get it. Like a laptop or desktop this is a device you always want more memory than you actually utilize on it... because if you hit the wall it will be a royal PITA. Murphy’s law of managing mobile device storage states that the likely hood of not having a file on the device you want is inversely proportional the importance of having that file... IE the more you need it the more likely it won’t be there. As a result it is hard to place a price on the peace of mind knowing you keep everything you desire on the device all the time. If you must pinch pennies please at least spring for the 32Gb versions. Unless you have some very specific use in mind that will never challenge 16Gb of storage you will thank me later.
Weight. This may be odd... but 1.5 pounds is surprisingly heavy. This is not a one hander device under pretty much any circumstance. Where this falls for you will probably depend on if you are comparing to a net book/laptop (its insanely light svelte etc...) or to a Cellphone or other mobile internet device (its a whale.. possibly a mean white one). This impression has stuck with me since the first day of use but I have certainly adapted to it.
The Apple case... I include this one because I really think Apple should have included something of this nature by default. Just like I complained about the lack with the Kindle it is pretty silly to not provide a solution for protecting the display from accidental scratches etc... As the iPhone and touch have adequately shown the glass used by apple is pretty stout stuff and it takes some doing to leave a scratch... but it does happen and it tends to happen when it is in transit. A micro fiber bag... a removable flip cover or the neoprene thing they produce or something should have been included in the box. The Apple cover does its job... and it has slowly improved on my initial impression of it but it is still a decidedly un-appleish apple product. I do not generally care about such things but this cover is a real grime magnet... and it looked dusty and grungy in about 5 minutes and its damn near impossible to clean. Its flimsy and as a result any orientation other than the wedge needs a pretty stable surface to be of any use. The folded back cover does not really lay right in your hand and the edges are very unergonomic. It does its job... just. Which is why it is here. Check out Mareware for some leather folio options that in general do a better job at the cost of some additional bulk.
The glossy screen. See my post about this same issue on my macbook pro.... then double the problem. The complication is that the natural inclination is to hold the iPad so that it reflects light to your eyes. This is due to years of conditioning all of us have reading printed materials. It doesn’t help that you typically hold it closer to your face than a laptop (magazine distance) which makes the angles such it is far more likely to do this than with a laptop screen. That deep glossy glean is sure purty... but it lasts all of 2 seconds and then of course you have greasy fingerprints all over it and can’t read anything on about a 1/4 (or worse) of the display because all you can see is a florescent panel in perfect mirrored detail only marred by said fingerprints. So why is this a ‘meh’ problem and not further down? Because it doesn’t take to much time before you automatically orient yourself away from such problems.. much the same as you already unthinkingly orient yourself to the light for printouts. It is still annoying and I personally recommend the purchase of an antiglare film. You lose a hair of the sharpness of the image and gain a surface much less reflective and better at resisting fingerprints. Hopefully at some point Apple will offer their anti-glare coating they offer on the Macbook Pro line now.
The Bad:
No USB. In all fairness I must admit that considering the design decision that the iPad was a companion device rather than a primary device means that the lack of USB makes perfect sense. But no matter how logical a decision it was, they screwed up. Exhibit A) The complete and utter lack of Apple’s ability to keep up with demand for the ‘camera connection kit’ which is basically $30 bucks for a plastic doohicky hanging off the iPOD connector port to give you a usb slot. The iPad internals actually have lots of empty space rather than the more typical crammed to the gills nature of bleeding edge mobile gadgets and a USB port could have been provided. Hear is hoping for it by default in future offerings along with complete USB functional support for 3rd party developers. Of course if it does you can trade any fears of burning in hell for freezing.
Zero exposure of the file system in the default iOS load. I am conflicted on this one. On the one hand the paving over of the file system guts is part of why I claim Apple has domesticated the computer... on the other I think what they have done amounts to a patch job and is still pretty half baked once you begin exploring the undesigned for use options. For example the Document viewing that I value so highly just is not really supported well and because they have hidden the traditional solution for file management (access to the file system... think My Documents on a windows machine) they have hamstrung one of the most well developed computer use paradigms that addresses that particular problem. I have no problem with Apple laying out a walled garden default environment... but they should have left some more traditional computing solutions exposed for those so inclined. This is far more forgivable on the iPhone and really is the only weakness when compared to the typical netbook when you start talking about computing versatility.
Lack of multitasking... or backgrounding if you will... out of the gate. What is a glaring lack (now mostly addressed in iOS 4) on the iPhone is a fundamental flaw in the iPad and one competitors need to exploit. Supposed to be fixed in October of this year.
Lack of Flash.THis probably has a lot to do the consistent battery life and it makes it a real hard balancing question to decide if it would be worth it to have included it. Apple says adobe has never demonstrated a capable mobile flash engine and I actually buy it. But when Steve Jobs said the iPad provided the “complete web in your hands” he lied out his his distortion field creating solid waste disposal tract. It is possible that in a few more months the statement may well turn out be true as 3 million+ new affluent mobile browsers is a juicy juicy incentive to have a website that is iPad friendly. The more I have read about this whole mess the more I think Apple is dealing with flash like an ostrich deals with something that frightens it. But to make a long story short the iPad (and pretty much any mobile device) does not have the tech specs to really run flash well... and in the cases where it is tried it is a battery draining demon from Dante’s deepest circles. On the other side of this story the Adobe brain trust is being about as ‘honest’ about the whole situation as the wizard of... I mean Jobs. This will get solved... but probably not for Gen 1 tablet devices. Primary reason being a relatively anemic mobile graphics platform and only 256mb of RAM in the current iPad. That glorious A4 Apple chip can only do so much on its own.
Lack of included screen protection of some sort. 500 dollars minimum entry for a device that is all about the screen should include at least a token screen protection option PERIOD. While I am at it the lack of a microfiber cloth is equally silly for a huge fingerprint magnet that requires you to touch it to do anything. The oleo-phobic magic screen coating makes it easier to wipe fingerprints off... it does absolutely nothing from keeping them from happening in the first place.
And last but certainly not least... AT&T’s )(*&@#)(*&)_#(*@%&_(*&#$@%*_(*@#$ bait and switch on the iPad unlimited 3G data plan. A seriously big selling point to me was the ability to drop 30 bucks for 30 days of unlimited 3G access when needed rather than every month. Most months wifi and maybe the cheaper 200Mb would be more than enough. However AT&T dropped the ability to bounce in and out of the unlimited plan. In fact they dropped the unlimited plan altogether and now only provide $25 per 2Gb and are only allowing folks that had the unlimited plan at the time they discontinued the plan to maintain it. So I generally leave my wifi off and utilize the 3G I am paying for. The replacement big plan that allows 2Gb is pathetic if you use services like Netflix’s streaming content as two or three hours of streaming will get you across that limit. I have yet been able to determine to my satisfaction if Apple knew this was in the works... and to date they have remained silent on the subject. But a huge selling point stressed in El Jobso’s keynote iPad speech was regarding the two data plans, especially the unlimited un-contracted month to month option which didn’t even last 1 month of retail iPad 3G availability. Sooner or later mobile broadband is going to get into a race to the bottom in terms of cost and it cannot come soon enough. In the meantime AT&T bites the wax tadpole. Obviously this is only of concern to those interested in high bandwidth use away from wifi... but when you get an iPad you soon find that without web access it swiftly becomes a paperweight for an awful lot of what you like to do with it. 250mb’s is small potatoes because the increased screen size, and long lasting battery life (we are used to sipping with phones because internet use generally kills them in short order) combine to take you past that very quickly even without heavy hitting services like youtube/netflix etc...
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