Reviews that come out right after a new gadget is out don’t really encompass the day to day usage of the device, or really offer any insight as to how you will enjoy the product after you have owned it for a while. This is why I decided to wait one month before I wrote my iPad review.
I bought my 64Gb Wi-fi only iPad on May 4, 2010. I paid $746.88 including tax. The buying experience was pleasurable. I drove up to the Apple Store in Salt Lake City, which is about a 40 minute drive for me, so it wasn’t too terrible. The Apple store was packed, but they deal with it well. I found their method of getting the product from the stock room to you, simply amazing. All you need to do is speak with an employee (and there are tons), they will login to any computer on the floor and pick the product that you want. After you have picked a product it sends a signal to one of the stock room guys who will will then bring the product right to your location. Once it is there, the original sales rep that you spoke with will ring up your purchase on an iPod touch (providing you’re using a card). This destroys pretty much any possible lines for purchasing, as long as you aren’t there on a release day. The only line I saw in the packed store were those waiting for a spot at the genius bar.
After I got it all unwrapped and started using it, I went through the normal, ‘omg i have a new gadget’ phase where I downloaded lots of apps, tried out lots of the features and played with the thing non-stop. My usage of the iPad has decreased significantly since that stage. Lets get into the good stuff:
Things the iPad does well:
Battery Life..
I have never had a product with a longer lasting battery. Even when I was in heavy use mode (about 7 hours + per day), it still took me two days to get it down to 0% remaining. This level of battery life can be tough to achieve with a screen as large and vivid as the one the iPad has. The auto brightness helps keep that in line though. The iPad has an ambient light sensor near the top which detects how much light is in the area, and adjusts the screen’s brightness appropriately to provide for optimal viewing without wasting battery. There is also manual brightness adjustment in the settings though, incase you’re showing off or something.
Responsiveness..
This thing responds fast, apps open quickly, and sites load fast in the browser. The whole UI experience is snappy. I’m not going to give all the credit to the A4 processor though (which isn’t that impressive). I think the reason it is so responsive is because the OS was built for the iPhone. Even the iPhone 3GS which has roughly half the processing power of the iPad is snappy. It’s almost entirely the same OS on the iPad. The main differences are in the display of the UI, which doesn’t require much extra power.
Prettyness..
The colors on the screen are rich and vivid, but not quite as good looking as the Nexus One’s display. The OS has smooth lines and overall looks great. Framed menus in the apps look excellent and provide awesome navigation without sacrificing on the content that it delivers. One of the primary examples of this is in the mail app. When viewed in landscape mode (i hate portrait mode, but more on that later), you get a list of all the messages in your current folder on the left hand side, then the message’s content on the right. The proportions are all correct, and it makes reading mail a great experience. When you select multiple messages (say for deletion, or moving to another folder), they appear in a stack on the right, similar to how you would stack papers, that is a great UI enhancement.
Intuitive..
Everything is exactly how you would expect it to be on a touch device. Pinch to zoom in browsing, two finger rotation in the photo app, flicks, slides, and double taps. It’s all there. I would say the single best thing about the iPad is how nice the controls are to use. Browsing experience on it is probably the best of any device ever, as long as you don’t need to provide any textual input in your browsing.
Games..
The game playing experience is excellent for puzzle based games, or simple games. I probably have about 30 hours into the game Angry Birds (best app I downloaded, by far). Don’t expect to be playing Call of Duty though, the games on the iPad are similar to what you would find on a site like addictinggames.com, except that most of them cost money.
Orientation Lock..
Orientation lock is an excellent feature they added to this device that hasn’t been this easy on older Apple mobile devices. There is a switch right above the volume buttons on the side that let you lock the current orientation (landscape or portrait), in it’s current state. It is similar to the iPhone’s silent switch, just with a different function tied to it. I didn’t enjoy browsing in landscape mode at all. Most websites are formatted for wide (or standard) screens, so the portrait mode browsing ends up having small, hard to read text, as well as a horizontal scroll (which drives me nuts). This is where Orientation Lock saves the day. I can lock it in landscape mode, lay on my side while browsing, with the iPad in a position where it would normally revert back to portrait mode. Excellent feature overall.
iPad still needs some work:
Text Input..
After a few hours of typing on the iPad, you get used to the keyboard, and it becomes not-so-bad to type on (in landscape mode). The virtual keyboard still pales in comparison to a physical keyboard though. I wouldn’t use the on screen keyboard for anything more than a few sentences at most. Basically just for basic website input, and tweets. I tried to take notes one day in class, but failed miserably. I couldn’t type fast enough without errors to keep up with the professor. That is a time where you would need the $69.99 bluetooth keyboard Apple wants you to buy for it. I just couldn’t justify dropping another $69.99 + tax after throwing down nearly a grand on the actual product.
Good luck entering your passwords by the way. Personally, I use secure passwords that are at least ten characters long, contain upper and lower case characters, a few symbols and numbers. Typing passwords like that in on the virtual keyboard is a HUGE pain in the ass. One of my passwords requires a key modifier on every single character typed. For example I have to type a number which requires changing screen, then a letter, which requires changing back, then a symbol, which requires changing back again, etc. etc. The whole process of passwords is atrocious. There isn’t a ‘remember password’ function for my App Store password either. Anytime I have to update an App or want to download a new one, it’s bad password time. I can type that same password on a physical keyboard in under one second. It takes nearly 20 seconds to get it right on the iPad.
Although the virtual keyboard doesn’t live up to my typing standards, I don’t think it could have been done any better. The word correction helps a lot. My main point is that I think they could have added a physical keyboard while still sticking to Apple stringent styling and form factor requirements.
Applications..
This is a big one. One of the biggest selling points of this device is the innumerable amount apps that you can download for it. There is only one problem with that: The apps made for iPhone/iPodTouch look like absolute shit on the iPad’s screen. If you do choose to download an iPhone app, you have two viewing options after you launch it. Full screen mode, or standard size. Because of the big screen on the iPad and the bezel, the regular size mode makes the app look minuscule. If you choose to go in full screen mode the application looks stretched, the buttons are way to big and cramped on the screen, and the whole experience is bad. This essentially knocks out one of Apple’s key selling points. Basically, if you’re planning on using the made for iPhone apps, don’t buy an iPad. I have a few on here mine that I won’t launch unless it’s absolutely necessary. Although the ability to for the user to have a bad experience with apps seems like a very un-Apple thing to do, it is nice to have the legacy support for essentials like the Skype app that don’t have an iPad version yet.
That being said, there are lots of great iPad apps out there. The caveat is that they cost about 2x more than their iPhone counterpart. The app maker slapped an ‘HD’ on to the end of the app name, tweaked the UI, and jacked up the price. This is terrible practice. Developers do have the option to make an iPhone and iPad version in the same build, which then would be the same price for both devices, however I have found that this is rare. Most developers slap the ‘HD’ tag on it to get more money. Of the Apps that I purchased, I would say the average price was around $6.00, the higher end ones costing between $10, and $15, and the lower end ones costing $1.99 or $0.00. Because of this app price gouging I had to limit my app consumption; after all, cash flow isn’t limitless. Coming from someone who uses mainly open source, free software, paying for applications was tough.
I never could find a decent SSH App for under $5.00. I did download one called ‘SSH for iPad’ (it was a few bucks), which wasn’t great. In this app, you can’t type directly at the command line, you have to format a string, which it then sends to the line to be parsed. I also couldn’t edit any files in SSH because there were no arrow keys in this program. I use ConnectBot (which was free), on my Android phone, and it has an amazing feature set that blows this SSH app away.
USB Support..
I didn’t realize this would bother me until it reached out and bit me in the ass one day. A friend brought his external hard drive to work, and he had a few seasons of a TV show that I really wanted. I have a lot of free space on my iPad so it would have been nice to just plugin the external hard drive and transfer the files directly to the iPad, then pull them off when I got home. This however, is impossible (without jailbreaking). I had to settle for transferring only half of what I wanted to my Android based phone (with much less space available on it’s SD card). This is something that is so simple, something they could have easily added, that would have made it worth it, even if I had only used it once.
Ebook Reader..
iBooks is the Apple ebook reading app that is free in the app store. It provides great a good reading experience, but it is still lacking some features. The iBooks app uses custom Apple defined font faces, which really detracts from the story. A lot of time goes into picking the correct font faces and size for the story as well as the spacing on the pages to give the reader a good experience. All of that work is pretty much demolished by iBooks because it doesn’t allow the book to choose it’s own font. A good example of custom font face adding to the story would be in the Harry Potter books. If you notice, the font isn’t normal, it’s printed in a font that matches the style of the story. iBooks allows you to adjust the brightness in-app, which is excellent because the brightness can hurt the eyes after long periods of reading. I still felt that the reading experience isn’t as good as a paper book, or the kindle though. The non-eInk screen hurts the eyes after prolonged periods of reading. I wouldn’t buy the iPad solely as an ebook reader. The major problem I had with iBooks, is that the iBookstore is lacking in selection. After I bought my iPad, I picked out a few books on suggestions from friends and family, but NONE of them were in the iBookstore. I ended up buying The Hunt for Red October just to test out the app, the book ended up being excellent though.
Things that drove me nuts:
Multitasking..
I don’t use multitasking much on my mobile devices, but there are a few key places where it is paramount, one of those places is when using Pandora. Pandora has an excellent app that streams music from any of my stations, and provides a great interface. This is all good and fine, if I JUST want to listen to music. If I want to listen to streaming music AND browse, this is a no go. As soon as you close the Pandora App, the music stops. A similar situation is when I listed to the This American Life podcast online. There is a link from the RSS feed direct to the mp3, so it just streams right in the browser. This basically renders my iPad unusable except for the sole purpose of listening to the radio show during that time. Also, it would be nice to background my SSH application for a few moments while I changed songs or something. This is basically a productivity killer, and it makes the iPad a little tough to use.
iTunes Only..
As with many(?all) mobile Apple products, they sync with iTunes, and iTunes only. There also happens to be ZERO iTunes Linux support. If I didn’t have a macbook lying around I wouldn’t have been able to activate my iPad and put music on it when I got it. Although I expected this, it would still be nice to see, at the very least, some Linux support.
Conclusion:
The iPad makes a great.. toy. That is honestly about it though. It is definitely not a laptop replacement by any means (hell, you can’t even use it without connecting it to a computer first). There are some pro’s about it, but I feel that the cons outweigh the pros. There will soon be cheaper tablets with wider feature sets that will outpace the iPad quickly. I would not buy the iPad again, at least until the 2nd generation comes out (probably next year).
Quick Overview:
++Prettyness
++Battery Life
+Responsiveness
-Text input is a joke.
-Applications selection is lacking, and very expensive.
-Missing USB support (e.g. external hard drive).
-No Flash
–No Multitasking
–iTunes Only