Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2010 > April > 09 > Entry
The iPad
Every few days, a co-worker or online friend will ask whether they should get an iPhone, or some other phone like the Motorola Droid or a BlackBerry Bold. And now that Apple has released its latest potential game-changing device, I’m getting asked, “Should I get an iPad?”
It wouldn’t be hard to write a review telling you the good and the bad of each part of the iPad (screen: beautiful; keyboard: takes some getting used to; App Store, cluttered as ever), but more than just about any new device I’ve had my hands on in the last few years, this one feels like it’s going to be a completely subjective experience. The iPad’s beauty (or lack of it), I think, is going to be completely in the eye of whomever’s holding it.
So I’ll no more “review” it than I could review a current-gen iPhone. With 185,000 apps, it’s impossible to tell you how it all fits together or how useful it’ll be to you as a potential buyer. It would be as easy as reviewing a country.
Instead, I’ll give you my impressions so far and tell you how we’re already using the iPad 32 GB Wi-Fi model I bought on Saturday in my house and how I think it’ll fit into our lives (that is, me, my wife and our two very young daughters).
I’ll also post a separate entry early next week with some of my experiences with apps for the iPad. The apps I’ve seen were the biggest factor in forming my opinion of the device and where I think its biggest potential lies.
Naysayer to buyer
In January, when Steve Jobs introduced the iPad as a “Magical” device that would revolutionize computing, I had to hold back my stomach acid. I thought his ego was getting carried away this time and that he was overhyping what, to my mind, was an oversized iPod Touch that lacked even some of the basic features that make the iPhone great. (A camera, for instance.)
But by April, my mind started to change. My wife was in need of a computer to replace her aging iBook G4 (which doesn’t even have a functioning battery; it’s plugged in all the time it’s in use). We considered buying a MacBook Pro, but when Jobs announced the iPad, my wife was intrigued. She told me that as long as she could print documents from it, it might be all she’d need. At $499 for the base Wi-Fi model, it would be about $800 cheaper than the MacBook Pro we’d have bought. My wife decided to wait until after the launch and take it for a spin at the store before buying one.
Apple didn’t send us an iPad to review, and as launch day approached (and when we found out printing apps would be available), I decided to go stand in line at Best Buy on launch day and see if I could get one. I rationalized quite a bit: “I can write about it for work.” “I really need to be up to speed on it.” “We were gonna buy one later anyway!”
That’s how I found myself at Best Buy in San Marcos at 8:30 a.m. with five other guys who were waiting. There were plenty of iPads to go around (when the shipment arrived, there were 30 for the store, 10 of each size). I played around with the demo units in the store, then took mine home. The moment my wife held it in her hands, she smiled. (Not as much as when our kids were born, but pretty close). She was smitten instantly. As an iPhone user, she knew exactly how to use it. It spoke the same language.
I spent the next few hours loading up the device with apps from my iTunes account, putting music and videos on it and putting it through its paces.
Impressions
It has that Apple magic. I was a naysayer in January, but somewhere between that slightly disappointing launch presentation and the day it arrived in stores, the software and hardware have come together to form something that feels good in your hands and operates (about 80 to 90 percent of the time) exactly as you’d want it to.
It’s speedy, much faster than even an iPhone 3GS for opening most Web pages and it handles HD-quality video with no hesitation, even if you skip around to different parts of a movie or TV show.
Apps that are familiar to iPhone or iPod Touch users like Mail, Calendar, and Photos have gotten pleasing facelifts that take advantage of the bigger screen to offer more panels of information in a neat, organized way. The trade-off is that there are no Stocks, Weather or Calculator apps. Perhaps Apple hasn’t finished those yet or didn’t think they were that important for the iPad. (Come on, Apple. No calculator? Really?)
Luckily, there are lots of great weather apps for free in the App Store and several calculator apps for about 99 cents. (My recommendation for that: the lovely “Digits.”)
The hardware feels dense and a little weighty even though it’s only a pound and a half. It’s got a switch to keep the screen from rotating if you need it fixed in one orientation and the home, on/off and volume buttons are just like the iPhone’s.
Now, about that 9.7-inch screen. It’s not a next-generation OLED screen, but it’s bright, beautiful and displays photos, videos and colorful apps like “Epicurious” so beautifully that you want to share what you’re seeing with everyone around you. It’s not as big as most laptop screens, but it’s fine for watching a TV show or movie by yourself. Most people I’ve shown it to think the iPad as a whole is smaller than they were expecting. But certainly not too small to render video, Web pages and photos in ways the iPhone can’t. A photo frame feature that can be accessed from the lock screen works nicely and can be configured to zoom in on faces in your photos or display multiple photos and transition them with origami folds. It’s a great feature.
iBooks and the Amazon Kindle reader are both powerful, well implemented e-readers. I like the eye candy of iBooks, which even displays text from the next page as you’re turning a page with the slow swipe of a finger. It comes with a free copy of “Winnie-the-Pooh” and the color illustrations, book cover and map in it make a great case against the black-and-white approach of the Kindle app. However, the Kindle app allow you to change the background of the text (white, sepia or white-text-on-black) and seems more straight-forward.
The speaker on the iPad is surprisingly good and surprisingly loud. It took me five days to even bother plugging a pair of headphones into it. (The iPad, by the way, doesn’t come with a pair of earbuds, a dock or even a cloth to wipe the screen. The screen gets covered in smudgy fingerprints often. You’ll be wiping it off a lot if you buy one.)
Web pages mostly load quickly (although I’ve been told that pages that have a lot of Javascript programming take a huge performance hit on the iPad). There are a few navigation quirks in the iPod app that make it needlessly difficult to find videos. (There’s a separate app icon for “Videos.”) And it’s puzzling that there’s no Cover Flow anywhere I could find in the iPod app.
The apps
What turned me from a skeptic into a believer on the iPad is simply the apps. It took a year for the App Store to launch after the iPhone came out and months after that for it to really take off.
As of today, there already 3,500 iPad apps out of an ecosystem of 185,000. And even on the day the iPad launched, there were already great apps like “Epicurious,” the news/audio app from the people I freelance for, NPR, the beautifully designed “Gilt” shipping app, “Marvel Comics,” the $10 “Scrabble” and “Plants vs. Zombies” and the “ABC Player” and “Netflix” which both stream good-looking video to the iPad.
I was a bit taken aback by the quality of the apps so early in the game. Most developers had no access to the hardware before it launched, yet with only a few exceptions, these apps were polished, fairly free of bugs and well-designed. And they’ll only get better with software updates.
Using older iPhone/iPod Touch on the iPad, however, is a bit of a bummer. They either work in the center of the screen, the size of an iPhone screen (which only makes you realize how small they are in that format) or blown up to double their size, making text fuzzy. It’s nice that they all run on the iPad, but you quickly begin to neglect those apps in favor of the full-bodied iPad ones. And you wish there were “Facebook” “Tweetie 2” and “Flickr” apps available now for the iPad.
If I had to score the iPad, I’d give the hardware a B (simply because it’s a familiar form factor missing a camera and without lots of new innovation), but the App Store selection and the implementation of the OS and software easily is an A.
What we’ll do with it
This morning, I sat on my back porch and tried to do my work solely on the iPad. I check e-mails, posted to Twitter, did some Instant Messaging and read RSS feeds.
It slowed me down quite a bit. Gmail and Google Reader, which I rely on, are a bit of a mess in their iPad Web versions right now and need some serious tweaking.
There’s not a great Twitter app for the iPad yet (for the time being I’m using the good-not-great “Twitteriffic”). And not being able to listen to a Pandora station or keep an IM session going while I Web surf is simply too frustrating to keep me away from my Macbook.
Typing for me is mostly fine, but I don’t think I’d try to write a blog entry like this or an article for the newspaper on it just yet (at least not without a Bluetooth keyboard or a keyboard dock).
So it won’t be replacing my laptop and it won’t be my primary computer in its current form. I edit video on my Macbook, keep lots of browser windows and put a lot of demands on my computer every day.
On the other hand, my wife, who wil be the primary owner of the iPad, doesn’t do any of those things. She pays bills, shops, checks e-mail and views photos. I plan to buy her an SD adapter so she can import photos directly to the iPad (it’s a $20 add-on that also comes with a USB adapter to connect a digital camera).
I think in terms of having a portable, powerful screen to do these things, it’s going to change the way she gets online and how she manages all her digital information. I think it’s going to be a device that my daughter will begin to watch videos on instead of the TV in the living room or on long road trips. I anticipate that in some way, it’s going to be a tool that’s going to help our daughters learn to read. It probably won’t leave the house much; it’ll always be near the couch, the nightstand or the kitchen counter, ready to pull up TV listings, recipes, a video, photos or an e-book.
Soon after I took it home for Easter to show to my family, my mom decided she wants one.
My brother, who had previously had no interest in purchasing one, bought one on Monday.
An American-Statesman photographer who shot Austin iPad owners bought one the same evening he shot the photos.
The iPad isn’t for me (at least not right now; I may buy one of my own in a few months if these apps keep me hooked). It’s not for a lot of the power users, Windows 7 wizards and BlackBerry-wielding road warriors. It’s more suited to everybody else who doesn’t need a lot of the extraneous horsepower and software we mostly take for granted on our PCs and high-end Macs.
Or maybe it will be for those power-computing people; they just don’t know it yet. I’ve been surprised by the about-faces I’ve witnessed from people who didn’t understand why anybody would want an iPad. Then they picked one up, played around for a few minutes, and instantly grasped how the iPad functions, what its design is trying to communicate and how they might fit such a device into their daily life.
Some people will download dozens of apps, create sketches, edit photos, Tweet, be creative. Others will sit with it on the couch and watch Netflix for hours and hours. I think it’s a device that sheds a lot of the dead weight we’re still schlepping into the 2010s and need to get rid of: mice, taskbars, overstuffed drop-down menus.
Apple has somehow made a device that works, that responds to you in a way that feels intuitive and that seems powerful without being overwhelming.
I think it’s going to sell well in surprising ways, to people you would never expect to buy an iPad. I think many people won’t get it until they try one for themselves, but once they do, they’ll start to do some mental calculations on whether the price is worth it. Some will agonize over whether to get a Wi-Fi version or one that can do 3G (for $130 more, plus the cost of Internet service; it will be out in a few more weeks).
Will it change the way everybody uses computers? I honestly don’t know. It’s going to change the way we use computers in my house and a lot of others. The iPhone changed the way we use mobile phones and the iPod forever transformed our music listening. But Apple TV failed to catch fire in the living room and the Macbook Air still feels more like an overpriced curiosity than a laptop landmark.
I hesitate to feed into the hype machine, but I can’t think of another device since the iPhone itself that feels so much like a peek into the near future as the iPad. Other tablets will be out soon that will do many of the same things (probably running Windows 7 or Android; I can’t say I’m looking forward to Windows shoved into this kind of device). But they’ll have a hard time topping the elegance and functionality that is already on the iPad from day one.
I don’t know if that’s magical, mystical, or transformational.
But that it got here at all and works as well as it does… that has to be some kind of little miracle.
More: my story from Saturday’s paper on what five other Central Texas iPad buyers think of the device. (Video below.)
And if you want even more, we’ll be posting a 1.5 hour podcast review on Age of Lasers tonight or tomorrow.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment Categories: Applications, Gadgets, Internet, Shopping
Comments
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By rob wise
April 22, 2010 10:31 AM | Link to this
I had two stolen
you won't believe what the hell apple is putting me
through to get them to cooperate with police.
rob
this is a good story
email me or call me