iPad Review

I had a chance to play with an iPad for a whole day–why not add my own thoughts to the throng of reviews 🙂

First off the typing.  While not as bad as I thought it might be, it could also be a whole lot better. I consistently have problems with the auto-correct on my iPhone, and naturally have the same problem on the iPad.  What’s more, the keys are placed like a regular keyboard.  For most this isn’t a problem, but those of us who have grown accustom to the iPhone will frequently hit shift instead of delete. What’s weird to me is, without a physical keyboard, Apple could get super creative with the interface–yet, for some reason they can’t even program in a caps lock.

The reading experience is similarly “just okay.” I did not use it enough to experience any kind of eye strain, but was almost blinded by the glare from the sun while reading on the bus. The mirror effect from the glossy screen is similarly kind of annoying. I’ll withhold my final judgment until we get a good app for reading and annotating pdfs, as well as a good manga reader.

The iPhone apps that were brought in seemed awkwardly small in 1x mode, and unacceptably pixelated in 2x mode. I couldn’t find any small-screen apps that I could tolerate using. Native iPad apps, however, were a different story. Many are scaled-up versions of their smaller cousins, and thus struggling a bit to use all of the screen real estate. Yet, the feel of interacting with these larger apps is kind of nice.  It’s more natural that using a mouse, and for this reason I could even see my parents could operating this thing.

In the end, I’m about where I thought I would be.  For those that don’t know how to use/update/configure a computer, the device is a winner (once we get our Google printing, that is). The rest of us are going to have to wait for the “killer app” that makes this form factor really make sense. Unfortunately, the platform won’t allow anyone to fix these interface complaints, like the keyboard layout. In Apple’s mind, if you don’t like it you must not be of sound mind.