12th
2010
A brief review of interesting things about the iPad in the first day
Here’s my brief review of the iPad so far:
1) There are some annoying but real hardware limitations. I don’t expect them to be fixed until the next rev, roughly a year from now. Notably, the device needs more RAM than it has. This may be mitigated through software revisions to be more clever in using what’s there, but it’s a ding. The battery life is awesome, but it has some weight to it, and it’s obviously almost entirely battery. It’s not so much that it’s “heavy” as it is heavy in a completely different way from anything else I’ve ever held. I’m using (very small) muscles I’ve never used before to hold it up and manipulate it. This follows the same model as every other Apple product I’ve used - there are some minor negatives, but they pale in comparison to the overwhelming positives. This is what happens when you make aggressive tradeoffs.
2) The software is very immature, but remarkably good given that most developers have only had their hands on the thing for a week. I expect this to get drastically better in the coming months.
3) All of the iPhone apps that I use which have iPad versions are significantly better on the iPad. They were pretty much all great before, and now they’re outstanding. Evernote and 1Password stand out.
4) Most everything is noticeably faster than the iPhone, but zooming and scrolling is MUCH faster and instantaneously responsive. This has the overall effect of making the things that you manipulate via zooming and scrolling (pinching and dragging) _almost_ feel like real objects. This is amazing. Web pages, photos, and especially the maps (oh the maps) really pop. I’d expected this would be good, but you really have to try it to realize just how good this is.
5) My wifi performance is a LOT better on 2.4GHz 802.11n than it is on 5GHz. I haven’t done exhaustive tests, but the Speed Test app gave 2MB downstream when connected to my Airport Extreme on the 5GHz network, and about 11MB downstream when connected via 2.4GHZ. Neither of these is as fast as my broadband connection.
6) Full screen video is outstanding. Netflix and Youtube are both stunning.
7) I was a bit surprised that there’s no Clock app anymore, which means there’s no way to use a timer with background notifications until OS4. There’s some speculation that Apple is working on a Dashboard type system, but this is still a strange omission - stranger even than the lack of a weather or stocks app.
That’s it for now. Much more later, I’m sure.
