Introduction
I was fortunate to have had about 24 hours to spend with and iPad during the launch weekend (thanks corporate overlords!). When you watch the "Guided Tour" videos that Apple released before the launch of the iPad, you'll notice that Apple is really focused on four things with the iPad:
- The quality of the screen,
- The quality of the the Multi-Touch interface Multi-Touch sensors in the display,
- The speed of the device, and
- The battery life
And there's really no denying that Apple exceeded expectations on all of those fronts. Review after review that I have read largely backs up the iPad's excellence in the above areas.
The display is definitely amazing. I'm not usually a big fan of LCDs: the viewing angle tends to be poor, and the black level is typically not very good. However, the IPS LCD in the iPad renders both of these problems moot. I did some tests where I tried to hold the iPad nearly 90 degrees from my eyes, and I could still view the on-screen image. And the black-level seemed great. I have heard some complaints about the low pixel density, but it didn't bother me one bit.
The display, like nearly all displays produced by Apple in the last several years, is really glossy. And aside from not having a diffuser, the LCD is covered with glass, so there are definite issues with reflection. I was trying to use the iPad near a window and I definitely had to position the device away from incoming sunlight in order to minimize the glare. But in low light settings, the display is sublime.
In playing around with various applications, and trying various gestures, the Multi-Touch sensors seemed to be incredibly accurate. To contrast the iPad with the Motorola Droid, the Droid has a very high-resolution screen (with much higher pixel density than the iPad), but I don't recall the viewing angle being as good. The Droid wasn't bad, but it's not as good as the iPad. But the Multi-Touch sensors on the Droid are just atrocious. In my testing I found that the Droid misinterpreted my touches more than 50% of the time. In addition, when using the Droid at night the soft buttons are always illuminated — so they distract you from the image that you're looking at on the screen. This stands opposed to the iPad, which has no lights on it whatsoever, save for the LCD display.
And it really is that simple — when you watch the introduction video, Jonathan Ive is almost giddy when he describes the design of the iPad. He is just so pleased with the fact that they were able to build something that looks so simple — just a display and a button. And really that's it, that's all you need to interact with the iPad. Everything that Apple does is in the pursuit of simplicity, and with the iPad I really feel like they have very nearly achieved the pinnacle.
The performance of the iPad does feel pretty impressive, for the most part. Apps launch quickly, and many webpages load quickly and are quite responsive once loaded. I did find some web pages that loaded sluggishly, however, and weren't as fast in terms of scrolling performance once loaded. For example, if you try and go to the Apple Store and choose a Mac Pro, and then attempt to configure it — that page will load quite slowly on the iPad. It seems like if a particular web page, once downloaded and parsed, can fit within the working set of memory, then it will appear quickly and be responsive. However, if the web page complex and therefore demanding memory-wise, then the iPad will be sluggish as it attempts to free memory that is used elsewhere in the system.
To but it another way, the iPad appears to be RAM constrained. Another way to notice this is to load a page in Safari, and then hop into a different application. In all likelihood, Safari will have been forced to deallocate it's memory, so when you jump back into Safari, it will have to reload the web page. I noticed that iPhone OS 3.2 is a bit smarter that previous releases — Safari will preserve the state of the back button, but you'll still have to wait for the page to load again. In practice, maybe this limitation isn't so noticeable. The common use-case is to hop into Safari, and hop from page to page, and then quit when finished. It's only if you're engaged in an activity that requires a mix of browsing and something else (like writing a report, for example), where you'll have a chance to be annoyed by Safari constantly reloading pages that it should already have in memory.
In terms of battery life, I didn't do an explicit run-down test, but the battery life seemed great to me. I was using the iPad constantly when it was in my possession (it was hard to put down, to be quite honest), and I was only able to get the battery down to about 30% remaining (starting from a full charge, with an hour of charging off of my MacBook Air). It seems like under normal usage patterns, the iPad will be able to go several days between charges, which is certainly better than what I get from my iPhone, and destroys what the MacBook Air can achieve.
Apple's Apps
Of the applications that Apple ships with the iPad, the ones that are really of note are Safari, Mail and Videos. The other Apple-supplied applications seem nice, but they're not really what the device is for. One application that you'll notice that I didn't mention is iPod. Normally this is one of my most used applications on an iPhone OS-based device, and I did use the iPod application some during my iPad testing. It can be nice to have iPod on in the background while you're reading something, but if you're using your iPad around the home, you probably already have some other source of music (like a stereo) that you'll prefer listening to instead. And due to the fact that the iPad isn't easily pocketable, I just don't see it's iPod functionality getting much use.
I have already spent some time on Safari, but there were a few other things that I noticed. Safari on the iPad can recognize video content embedded in a web page (so long as it isn't Flash), and play it back, right in the page. On the iPhone, tapping on an embedded YouTube video, for example, will launch the full screen player. Embedded videos on iPad Safari do offer up a control to take the video fullscreen. And in my testing, this all worked pretty well. The other thing I have read a bunch about iPad Safari is that manipulating web pages with touch is a more "natural" way to experience the web, and leads to Apple's claim that the iPad is the "best" way to surf the web. In practice, I did find a certain amount of joy in viewing web content on the iPad. The best thing that I can say is that I oftentimes found myself getting lost — instead of testing something, I found that I was just reading the web as I normally would. As long as you're viewing web content that the iPad can handle well (which in my testing was just about everything), then I found that it's pretty easy to be taken in by Safari on the iPad.
Video on the iPad is fantastic. It is fast to launch the video application, and once you chose something, the iPad starts playing it instantly. No DVD menus, commercials, loading, or any of that garbage. And holding it in your hand, it's easy to position the iPad so that you can become immersed in the video. I have seen some complaints about the fact that the screen on the iPad is in the 4:3 aspect ratio, whereas most modern content is in the 16:9 aspect ratio. And sure enough, when I watched part of "Up", I found that there were black bars above and below the video. But it really didn't bother me whatsoever. However, when I watched an episode of "The Simpsons", I was blown away. "The Simpsons" is entirely animated in the 4:3 aspect ratio (except midway through season 20 and beyond, which is in HD), so the video just fills up the entire screen perfectly. I can't think of a better device portable for watching "The Simpsons", or any other 4:3 content for that matter.
Next up, is Mail. This is one of the applications that I was most looking forward to playing with on the iPad. Every morning on my bus ride to work I fire up my MacBook Air and go through all of my mail, so that I'm ready to hit the ground running when I get into the office. Therefore, if I were to switch to iPad for my daily commute, then it would have to rock when it comes to handling e-mail. Unfortunately, I found Mail on the iPad to be quite disappointing. Depending on how you hold the iPad, you get two different views on your Mail. In portrait mode, you see a single e-mail message in full screen. If you have a dense e-mail that you want to spend time reading, this is a great view. However, navigating to different e-mails in your Inbox in portrait view is a pain. You can tap on the "Inbox" button in the upper left, which will produce a new UI element in iPhone OS 3.2, called the pop-over:
iPad Mail in portrait view. Photo credit: Apple
While this looks nice and pretty in a screen shot, in practice, I found it cumbersome to use. It doesn't give a very large view to the messages in your inbox. And if you accidentally tap outside of the pop-over, it disappears. In general, I found portrait view in iPad Mail to be pretty unappealing. Switching to landscape was better, the list of messages in your inbox are always present on screen, and take up more space than the pop-over, and are thus easier to manipulate:
iPad Mail in landscape view. Photo credit: Apple
In addition, I vastly preferred the the landscape keyboard to the portrait one. In portrait mode, the on-screen keyboard is too large to be used just with thumbs (at least, for hands of my size), but too small to attempt to touch-type. In landscape mode, the on-screen keyboard is almost full size, and touch typing seems possible. It still felt weird — on a normal keyboard, I type with the tips of my fingers, which are striking a surface that has some "give" (a key that actually moves). On the iPad, I was striking a rigid surface that doesn't give at all. I found this to be uncomfortable, especially when contrasted with my iPhone. On the iPhone, I type using two thumbs, but I strike the screen using the pad of my thumb, not the tip. I found this to make a pretty big difference, in terms of comfort level.
But getting back to Mail, there were two more things that bugged me. It still takes far too many taps to switch between inboxes in different e-mail accounts (something that appears to be fixed in iPhone OS 4). In addition, deleting messages in iPad Mail is really slow. Not due to CPU or memory limitations, but rather due to the fact that on the iPad, Mail makes a nice animation of your e-mail shrinking, and actually dropping into the "trash" icon. While this looks cool the first several times you delete an e-mail, it quickly wears, especially if you have a lot of e-mail to delete. I'm probably atypical in this regard — every morning when I check my work e-mail, I have typically have over 80 new e-mails that I want to read quickly and discard. I can rip through these pretty quickly using Mail.app on my MacBook Air, but just going through a handful of similar e-mails on the iPad was tedious.
Apps from the App Store
Moving on from Apple's applications, I think that what's really going to sell people on the iPad is the App Store. While the iPad can run all of your iPhone applications, I found, like many other reviewers, that iPhone applications running on the iPad are a total let-down. The difference between iPhone applications and those that are written specifically for the iPad is like night and day. In my time with the iPad, I found that I vastly preferred the iPad native apps to the iPhone apps. Most iPhone apps that I launched on the iPad, I did quickly just to see what they looked like, and then I was done. But with apps that were built with the iPad in mind, it was a totally different story. I spent quite a bit of time in those applications — the extra screen real estate really makes a difference. And it's only going to get better — of the apps that were iPad-native on day one, very few were developed with actual hardware in then hands of the developers. So, even though what's available now is fairly impressive, I think that once developers have had some time to spend with actual iPad hardware, there will be a leap forward in the quality of the apps available.
For watching video, I tested both the ABC app the Netflix app. They both worked great — I was able to watch an entire episode of "Modern Family" in the ABC app, and I watched the first 5 minutes of a movie from Netflix. The quality of the video seemed acceptable, and the performance over WiFi was fine — video loaded quickly, and there weren't any pauses for buffering. That's not to say things were perfect — both applications could use some polish. The Netflix app is basically just a wrapper for their website — that is the interface for navigating your queue and choosing a movie. Once you have made your selection, the Netflix app simply throws you into the default video player in iPhone OS. Turning to the ABC app, it has quirks of it's own. Upon staring the application, it's clear that it's meant to be used in portrait mode — that is the only way to select a show to watch. Once the video stream starts, you can rotate the iPad into landscape mode and the ABC app will show the video in full screen. But it doesn't rotate, like almost every other application, instead the video just snaps into the new orientation. However, if you keep rotating, and get the iPad so that it is upside-down, the ABC app returns to portrait mode again, but the content isn't in the correct orientation. And I don't know about you, but I think that forcing me to read upside down text is a bug, not a feature. So, there is some stuff like that which needs to be fixed. Stability is also an issue — I managed to get the ABC application to crash at least once when playing with it. But on the whole, these two applications really show the promise of the iPad platform for watching video.
Twitterific was available on launch day, and the only application that I tested for doing Twitter on the iPad. I found I really didn't like Twitterific — it looks beautiful on the iPad but there's a lot of strange user interface conventions employed and the entire application just didn't feel "right" to me. In general, my interactions with Twitterific just weren't as elegant or as efficient as I would like. I can't wait to see what Loren Brichter, the developer of Tweetie (for iPhone and Mac OS X) will do with the iPad. I bet Tweetie for iPad is really going to be amazing. It could easily turn the iPad into the premier platform for interacting with Twitter.
Using Instapaper on the iPad was a real treat. Marco Arment has once again raised the bar, just pushing things forward. When reading web pages that I've saved to Instapaper on the iPad everything else simply disappears. Instapaper gets out of the way, and lets me focus on reading the text of the web, in a way that's beautiful and extremely well-crafted. I could see spending a lot of time in this application, were I to own an iPad (I already use it a ton on my iPhone).
Apple's iBooks application is amazingly well done. I found it incredibly easy to navigate the store and find a book, download it, locate it on my virtual bookshelf, and begin reading it. And the reading interface is just fantastic — I was surprised how quickly I stopped fooling around with the iPad and just became immersed in the book. I can't see really what Apple needs to improve here, although there are some complaints about fonts and book formatting issues, but once you get to the actual meat of the book, I didn't find much to complain about. I can definitely see how people are going to read a lot of books on the iPad.
I also downloaded the Marvel comics application and its a great experience for reading a comic. It really looks beautiful, it's easy to navigate the store, it's easy to download a comic, and it's easy to see which comics you've already downloaded. The reading experience is great — there's two different ways to read: in full-page mode and in one-panel-at-a-time mode. In full-page mode, tapping on the left or right goes to the next or previous page, respectively. In order to fit an entire comic page on the iPad it is a little zoomed out, so text can be difficult to read at times, but if you want to zip through a comic as fast as possible, this is the way to go. In panel mode, the application will intelligently show you each panel on the page, panning from one panel to the next with a tap. I found this to work quite well, and it was a whole different way to experience a comic (because your eyes can't "cheat" and look down the page). The panel mode is even pretty smart about wide panels with text on either side — it will show you the text on the left side, and with a tap, zip you over to the right side for the rest of the text. Once again, I can definitely see the iPad as being a really great device for reading comics. The biggest problems, however, are due to the fact that each publisher will be supplying their own application in the App Store.
A couple of things fall out of this. The first is that pricing will vary wildly between applications. In the Marvel application, there were a handful of free comics, and the rest were $1.99 an issue. That can get pretty expensive pretty quickly (virtual comics being much easier to purchase and download than their paper counterparts). But it gets worse — any comics bought in the Marvel application are "stuck" in that app. Due to the way applications are sandboxed in iPhone OS, any downloads that occur within an application reside within that application. Thus, the only way to make a backup is to sync with iTunes. But because there is no integration with iTunes beyond that, there's now way to choose specific issues to sync down to the iPad. And when it comes to reading comics that you've bought in the Marvel application on your iPhone, or on your Mac or PC, then you're at the mercy of the developer. Unless Marvel supports this, you're out of luck. And even if Marvel comes up with something, you'll have to re-download any comics that you've already purchased, because there is no (supported) way to extract them from the iPad application's sandbox.
Because of these issues, I can't see myself actually buying any comics using the Marvel application, if I were to own an iPad. In general, buying content that's locked into a specific application on a specific device just doesn't make any sense, especially if you're considering spending a lot of money. This is the real hidden downside of Apple’s approach for getting content on the iPad that doesn't come from any of Apple's stores. With content from Apple's stores, even if there is DRM, it's well known what you will or will not be able to do with that content. And you can still get at the individual files, and back them up however you want. And regarding the iBook store, it's clear that Apple will eventually let you read those books on other devices (including the iPhone starting with the new version of the OS that comes out this summer). I think that in general, consumers aren't stupid — they understand that when they buy some piece of content (comic book, magazine, etc.) they can read it as many times as they want, wherever they want and however they want. And in addition, when they're done with it they can pass it on to someone else. I think that these sorts of things are figured into the the value proposition, if not explicitly than subconsciously. So, I predict that sales of things like $5 single-issues of Time will be poor until some of the lock-in goes away, or Apple brings these types of content under the iTunes umbrella.
Bluetooth
Earlier in the year I went through another of my phases were I really want to purchase a netbook. The CES had just happened — there were just a ton of netbook announcements in the span of a week. One in particular, the HP Mini 210, really caught my eye. But in order to justify the purchase, I always have to figure out how I'm actually going to use the intended device enough to justify the money that I spend. The twist this time was that I became fascinated with the idea of having a device that I could use for watching video content — maybe in bed or at the kitchen table. But I knew that I'd be unhappy with how this video would sound, as delivered by crappy netbook speakers. However, I thought it would be really cool to have the audio playback through my stereo. But of course it would have to do so wirelessly so I could move the device all around my apartment without having to drag any cables around. So I did a bunch of research and I found that Bluetooth really seems to be the way. I did find one device from Sony, a little box that you hook up to your stereo. It can pair with another device, and then receive audio via Bluetooth and the A2DP standard. But it was like $80, and I didn't want to spend that sort of cash on an experiment that might not pan out. So instead of investing in that I thought I would just try to use my iMac. There's a full Bluetooth A2DP implementation in Mac OS X — it can either send out audio or receive it. So my plan was to try and see if I could get a netbook to send out Bluetooth audio to the Mac.
I never ended up buying a netbook but I still felt that this idea was pretty good. So one of the first things I tried to do with the iPad was to pair it to my iMac over Bluetooth, so I could try and get it to send audio to my iMac and then from there to my stereo. And what I found was actually pretty surprising — Bluetooth pairing between a Mac and an iPad flat-out doesn't work.
I was able to get the iPad to pair with my iMac, however it took some doing. By default the iPad was not able to see the iMac, even though Bluetooth was turned on and both devices were set to be "discoverable". However, the iMac was able to see the iPad. So from the iMac I could initiate the pairing request. This did cause the iPad to say "hey somebody's trying to pair with me", at which point it popped up a dialog asking for the pin code. Unfortunately, for some reason the iMac didn't realize that the iPad was waiting for a pin code and never displayed a pin code for me to type in, so pairing failed.
I tried this multiple times and it failed the same way every time. Fortunately on Mac OS X you can actually go into advanced settings and set an explicit pin code. Thus, when the iPad requested a pin code, I could just type in the one that I had set, without waiting for the iMac to display one for me (which it never would do). This got pairing to succeed between my iMac and iPad, however, the two devices wouldn't connect. On the iPad it would show an entry for my iMac, but say "not connected". I could tap on this entry and the iPad would attempt to connect on the iMac — I could see that the connection status would go "green" on the iMac. But then as quickly as it went green, it would go back to red. After spinning its wheels for awhile, the iPad would give up on the connection. I went through the general troubleshooting motions — I tried deleting the pairing and repairing the two devices. I tried pairing with my MacBook Air, but and witnessed the same behavior. To put it simply, it appears that streaming audio out of an iPad over Bluetooth doesn't work. To be sure, this is a disappointment. And it's anyone's guess if this is something that Apple is going to fix in later revisions of the iPad OS.
Conclusion
The iPad has been hailed as everything from "revolutionary" to a "game changer". The iPad's supposed impact on the industry has been favorably compared to the impact that the original Macintosh had in 1984. So, is the iPad totally going to change computing forever?
That's hard for me to say. For me, it was pretty clear after seeing Steve Jobs demo the iPhone at Macworld in 2007, that phones were about to go through a total revolution. I mean, just looking at how elegantly the iPhone worked, it was clear that in just a few years, all phones would work this way. And a few years from the launch of the iPhone, I would say that the phone market is largely going in the direction first established by the iPhone.
But will the same be said about the iPad? While I think that touch is great for a lot of things, and can certainly replace the mouse in most instances, real, hardware keyboards don't appear to be going away any time soon. So with devices like the iPad, the implication is that you're still going to have a computer for some tasks, and a tablet for other tasks. Thus, for this to take off, there's going to have to be really great software to keep data in sync, and user education so that people know when to choose their tablet over their PC, and vice-versa.
So unlike with the iPhone, I don't think that the future of tablets, or computing in general, is set in stone. One thing I will say, however, is that I've been a little disappointed with the lack of innovation coming from the PC industry over the last few years. Sometimes, it really does seem like Apple is the only company out there that is doing true, original, groundbreaking work. And since, for better or worse, a lot of Apple's innovations are copied, the iPad could herald the future of computing simply by default. I hope that this isn't the case, and that some other worthy challengers emerge, with a different vision, to challenge Apple and the iPad. But I'm not holding my breath.
But moving back to the here and now, in it's first version, the iPad certainly has a lot of things that recommend it. The screen, the battery life, and the potential of the App Store are all killer features. But if you want to know if you should buy one, all I can say is that if you're at all thinking about getting an iPad, then you should definitely go and play with one first. Think of how you might want to use an iPad, and then go to an Apple Store and play with just those features. In my visits to the Apple Store, there were employees on hand, available to answer questions. Take advantage of this, and ask about anything you're unsure of. Because deciding on the iPad, like with all personal technology, is an individual decision.
As for me, while I certainly enjoyed my time with the iPad, I think that for me, it has the same problem as all of the netbooks that I've lusted after: I just don't think that I'll use it enough in order to justify the purchase. When I moved to San Francisco, I structured everything around my stereo and my iMac. That's where I spend all of my free time, and I just don't see the iPad pulling me away from that.
But after all is said and done, I still kindof want one. And I can't say for sure that I won't end up buying one. And that's gotta count for something, right?
-Andy.