10 Minutes With the iPad
April 3rd, 2010, 7:26pm by Mike
As everyone knows, today was launch day for the iPad, with lines at many stores (though not big lines at most places, from what I’ve read), and lots of people were at least interested in seeing what all the hubbub was about.
I was with Adam when I visited the Apple Store today, and he wasn’t in the mood to let me have any extended time with the iPad. But I was able to play with it a little bit and make some first impressions.
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First, it is whatever you thought it was before you saw it. If you came to it thinking “it’s just a big iPod touch,” then that’s what you probably saw, because largely, it is. If you think it’s a revolutionary device for some specific application (web surfing on the couch, book reading, etc), it’s those things, too. Much of this is because we already knew so much about it. It was announced and demoed 3 months ago, and large parts of iPad are pretty much what the iPhone has been for the last 2.5 years.
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The thing that’s different of course, and goes some way to making this a “revolutionary device,” is the screen size. Basically, the iPod touch has been made to have a display the size of a netbook, and that opens the doors to lots of possibilities. Movie watching will be cool. Apps have a lot more real estate to deal with. It’s big enough to actually read books and magazines.
On to the specifics…
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It just has to be said, the keyboard is pretty bad. Even though it is about the same size as a netbook or laptop keyboard, I found it nearly impossible to type on. The thing is, with the iPhone’s soft keyboard, it’s so small that there’s no way to touch type as you do on a computer — your brain realizes that this is a different mode of text entry, since you’re using your thumbs (the fact that the keyboard is laid out in a familiar way makes typing much faster, along with good auto-correction and predictive key sizing). But on the iPad, there are a couple of things wrong:
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First, the keyboard has no tactile feedback. Again, fine for me on the iPhone, but not when you’re using two hands to touch type.
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Even if the keyboard is the size of a standard keyboard, it’s not a standard keyboard as far as keys. For example, there’s no apostrophe key, which kills me (I use one in nearly every sentence I type, it turns out).
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Bottom line, it’s bigger, but it’s the iPhone typing experience, made bigger. It has great auto-correction (which is necessary). On the iPhone, you can type quickly be exploiting the auto-correct (e.g., intentionally misspelling contractions), but when typing as usual, with two hands, I can’t do that, mentally. If you want to do any substantial typing, you’ll want to look into the keyboard dock or use an external bluetooth keyboard (with some sort of iPad stand).
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Web surfing is as good as they say. It really did feel like something new to have a device this size have a very natural way to surf the web. For example, on the iPhone, loading the 5-columns wide NY Times web page basically just shows the page layout — the text is too small to read until you start zooming in. On the iPad, you can actually read the headlines and the excerpt of article text, which makes it feel much like the newspaper.
Still, I think they could have gone a little farther with some little things — like why does the address bar stay visible all the time, unlike on the iPhone, where it disappers once the page is loaded?
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Native iPad apps look stunning on that big, bright screen. Anything you do on an iPhone, after the developer ports it to the iPad, will feel one million percent better. However…
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You need native iPad apps — iPhone apps won’t do. I was hoping that the NY Times app that was demoed at the announcement would be available. And the demo iPad I had today had a NYT icon on the home screen. When I clicked it, the iPhone app launched (Joanie’s comment when I told her this story: “Did it then crash?”). The pixel-doubling looked absolutely terrible, as bad as you might fear. On the other hand, native iPad apps looked stunning. So you’d better hope that even if the developer of your favorite iPhone app isn’t doing anything drastically different for iPad, they at least recompile to allow font replacement so their apps don’t look terrible.
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Finally, maybe important only to me, is that it can tether with ad-hoc wifi networks. Steve Jobs tersely answered “no” when asked whether the iPad would allow tethering with phones. I tested it with MyWi on my jailbroken iPhone, and it worked great. Makes me wonder whether there’s any reason for me to get the 3G model, since I can’t imagine using an iPad in a situation where I both didn’t have wifi and didn’t have my cell phone. (One reason would be GPS, which isn’t on the wifi version.)
The bottom line for me, today, after 10 minutes (realizing that this will definitely change over time): Apple did a great job with the iPad hardware, and there’s no question that it’ll be great for consuming media. One of the big unknowns was how it would be for creating (documents, emails, presentations, etc), and my answer to that question right now, is not that great. I didn’t have time to really try out the apps, but typing more than a little was painful.
All this being said, it’ll be great for what I’d use it for. And when that’s not enough, I have a netbook.
April 4th, 2010 at 12:16 am
I’m surprised that the iPhone apps don’t scale up better, I mean larger fonts should still be sharp and such. Do they really just double all the pixels? Seems odd.
You do use a lot of apostrophes. I’d like to have one (as opposed to buying one), but not really sure what role it would fill besides couch surfing and an eBook reader. A killer Flickr app would be nice. But as I quickly learned w/ the netbook, I type a lot online and even a decent netbook keyboard was a little too tough.
For me to get one, it would have to have one more stellar feature that I’d exploit. Not sure what that would be.
April 4th, 2010 at 2:07 am
So I spent maybe 3 minutes with an iPad at a packed Apple Store, one that Steve Wozniak was at before me!
My initial impression was that it was heavier than I expected. But Mike’s exactly right. I thought it’d be a huge iPod and it was. Not that that’s a bad thing.
That photo’s pretty good, Btw!
April 4th, 2010 at 7:35 am
@Kelvin: The photo wasn’t mine, it was stolen without attribution from here, and is from the NYC store on Broadway.
@Jake: I agree, something just seems missing for me. I’ll see if there’s a killer app out there over the next couple months — I’ve pretty much decided to put off a decision until later in the summer — by then, there will be more iPad-specific apps, iPhone/iPad OS 4 should be out (or on the way), there will be whispers (at least) of new hardware, and we’ll know more about Apple’s overall strategy with this thing (e.g., TV subscriptions, cloud storage/streaming of music, etc.)
April 4th, 2010 at 11:46 am
So you guys don’t think Netflix/ ABC is that killer app? That seems pretty compelling to me.
April 4th, 2010 at 12:06 pm
Not really. I think watching Netflix on my TiVo or MacBook is far more compelling.
April 4th, 2010 at 12:24 pm
Not a Netflix subscriber anymore (haven’t been for a couple years), so for me, no. Could definitely change with Adam getting a little older, when he starts to watch movies.
One thought I had is that this would be a really cool car computer. Imagine GPS on that huge screen! And it would be great for watching movies, instead of portable DVD players.
Finally, for me, Apple getting a subscription service together would be great — with Macs, AppleTV and an iPad (or just iPhones), we’d be in great shape for watching at home or on the go. Which goes back to the “wait and see,” above.
April 4th, 2010 at 1:02 pm
I’d rather watch video on an iPad than a Macbook pretty much anytime. If you imagine using a laptop over than a tablet for something as passive as consuming video, where there’s no benefit to keyboard input, it doesn’t sound like the tablet form factor makes much sense for you.
April 4th, 2010 at 1:38 pm
@mike, to use a favorite analyst word, the “ecosystem” that Apple’s built around TV for someone with your hardware investments is pretty impressive, and would be helped greatly by a subscription service that’s competitively priced with cable. If the networks won’t play ball, I really don’t see why Apple doesn’t just add PVR functionality into either the AppleTV or a Mac. That would sell a lot of AppleTV’s and iPads.
April 4th, 2010 at 1:47 pm
The problem with a tablet is you have to hold it. With a laptop, there’s a built-in stand! I suppose that could be easily remedied. Obviously, the iPad is an advantage if you have to hold it, but if I had to hold it I’d rather have an iPod Touch or Dell Mini 5.
April 4th, 2010 at 3:13 pm
I wouldn’t prefer watching on a laptop, unless the alternative involved bringing an iPad and a laptop, like on a business trip — then the iconvenience of two devices outweighs that of watching on a laptop.
And the issue of holding an iPad is a real one for movie watching. Even using an iPhone on a plane is a bit of a pain to hold angled correctly (of course, you can’t even open a laptop on a plane seat — which is why my movie peg is on the way). I’m sure someone will sell a folding stand of some sort for the iPad, if they aren’t already.
April 4th, 2010 at 9:30 pm
Wouldn’t you guys get the official iPad case? I thought it folded out into a stand. Thing is going to be 2 lbs once you factor in the case. My brother Ed takes his Kindle out of its case if he’s planning to do any extended reading, and that only comes to 1 lb combined.
April 5th, 2010 at 10:02 pm
I went and spent a few more minutes with the iPad at lunch today. Couldn’t help but notice the touchstone-like mount they had it on at the store. I think I would need something like that on my coffee table.
April 6th, 2010 at 5:58 am
Yeah, demoing the iPad. Is a little awkward, since the claim is that it’s meant to be a “sitting device,” and there are no chairs in the Apple Store. The slant of the base basically acknowledges the fact that it’s weird to lay it flat on a table to type.
I went back at lunch, too — my opinions stand. One thing I forgot to mention about the keyboard — of course you can’t rest your fingers on it like a normal keyboard (as we were taught to do when touch typing), and there’s no wrist rest. When holding it in portrait mode yesterday, I was actually trying (instinctively) to use my thumbs to type on it!
April 6th, 2010 at 12:50 pm
iPad will make an awesome car computer once you have a few kids and they can tether their iPads to your jailbroken Phone and stream kiddie movies as you drive around :).
April 6th, 2010 at 2:41 pm
What happens for text input with iPhone apps on the iPad? Does it launch the native iPhone keypad (sounds ridiculous in either 1X or 2X mode), or hand off to a full iPad keypad?
What do you guys make of iPhone 4.0? Is it odd that they didn’t roll out the iPad with the new software, or can we assume the software update is still months away from release, like they did with 3.0 last year?
April 6th, 2010 at 4:02 pm
Well, it’s a iPhone 4.0 OS Preview. Maybe it will include the ability to multitask GPS with other apps, thus its debut before the iPad 960.
April 6th, 2010 at 4:30 pm
What’s the iPad 960?
It’ll be a while before OS4 is out. I’m sure Apple will have some form of multitasking, but I’m betting it’ll be limited in some important way. Also expecting lots of not-so-important changes, holding out hope for a streaming music solution built into iTunes for iPhone.
I’m thinking summer.
If there’s no huge advantage, I may actually stay on 3.1.2 as long as I can. I’m actually perfectly happy, and fear that upgrading may actually take away jailbreak things I’ve really come to like.
April 6th, 2010 at 4:34 pm
iPad 960 is my name for the 3G iPad, in honor of the $960 it will cost for the first year. I now realize it’s actually the iPad 990. My bad!
April 6th, 2010 at 6:20 pm
It seems to me that some of the more common use cases for background tasks/multitasking could be addressed with a task scheduler, and that should have very little affect on battery life. Let developers schedule timed events so that the app could launch, perform a task in the background, and then close. I mean, it’s useful to have your twitter feeds and podcast/RSS feeds updated at certain intervals, but you don’t want to have to run the apps continuously.
From my battery testing (I have a battery monitor app), it actually doesn’t seem to me that multitasking has much of an effect on battery life. Seems to me that the battery drains at the rate of your most battery intensive task. Jobs once said that running AIM in the background decreased the iPhone’s battery life by 80% or some nonsense, but that seemed disingenuous to me. Maybe 80% compared to NOT running AIM, but I bet it was almost exactly the same as running AIM in the foreground continuously.
April 6th, 2010 at 10:16 pm
@Jake Your cheeky “iPad 990” name assumes that somebody pays for the unlimited 3G service every month, which they don’t have to do, since there’s no contract. A more accurate name might be the “iPad 630-990,” which doesn’t compare that unfavorably to the “Pre 990,” the cheapest version sold on Sprint’s website. 😉
April 6th, 2010 at 11:29 pm
The lack of a contract for the iPad is good and bad, right? No contract, but no subsidy either, so it depends if you, the consumer, were planning on getting that data plan.
To Jake, are you implying that $30 is a bad price? Carriers are charging $60/mo for 3G enabled netbooks (under contract, even), and is there reason to believe that netbooks would use more data?
April 7th, 2010 at 12:01 am
Yeah, but at leas the Pre 990 can multitask!
$60 for a netbook is a bigger rip-off, not a serious attempt for the mass consumer market. For the iPad, unless I could think of a specific use case (such as installed in a car as an uber GPS and general purpose computer), I’d pass on the 3G.
April 7th, 2010 at 12:32 am
Obviously, data pricing reflects supply constraint. The last thing any carrier wants is mass consumer uptake of a limited resource at low prices. AT&T has a constrained network as it is, so I’m surprised they offered the iPad such low 3G rates. Obviously, I have a hard time imagining a scenario where I’d take an iPad on the road, so 3G seems like an unnecessary luxury. Still, I can imagine there are people for whom the iPad 990 seems is a real bargain. Consider this– $30 is what AT&T is charging for data to the iPhone, and I’m sure there are plenty of people who’d get more bang for their buck with a data plan on an iPad than on an iPhone (bandwidth hogs like Mike excepted, of course).
April 7th, 2010 at 1:27 am
Thing is, the cost for wireless carriers is probably higher for computers, but the value is less for consumers. I think the carriers figured laptops would use twice as much data, meaning the costs would be twice as high, so they just doubled their price. But the value for consumers is probably half. I actually think the $15/month for 250MB could be a good middle ground for a laptop– geared towards people that just use it for web surfing in a pinch. The comparable MiFi plan is $40/month.
April 7th, 2010 at 2:05 am
With more and more data in the cloud, it’s clear that people are increasingly dependent on always-on networking. I’m sure that more and more portable computers (laptops, tablets, whatever) will have the capability for cell network connection in the next year or two — we’ve already seen this manifested as a separate device (MiFi) and subsidized netbooks on many carriers.
Also, the iPad is already looking like a device that’s meant for streaming video, with the likes of Netflix and ABC already on board, and I’m sure Hulu will be there shortly. Not that 3G is ideal for that, but initial reviews suggest Netflix streaming is quite watchable. This thing will eat more data than a netbook, guaranteed.
Separately, the pricing structure of the networks has to be revamped at some point — it’s ridiculous to think that we should pay high prices for unlimited data on each device separately, rather than a single fee to cover them all (phones, tablets, whatever). Assuming you wouldn’t just have a personal account to let all your devices on the net at once, one way this would be cool is if all these devices could support both telephony and data, and you could just move a SIM card-like token to whatever machine you were using at the time. Isn’t that what SIM cards were supposed to be for, anyway?
Say what you will about the iPad’s 3G (personally, I don’t see the draw, either), but for some people, it’s what they want. And I think $15 is a bargain for 250 MB off contract.
April 7th, 2010 at 3:38 am
It actually works that way now Mike. If you had a netbook with 3G (or a 3G PC card), you could slip in your iPhone’s SIM and AT&T would be none the wiser. The only thing preventing you from doing the same with a 3G iPad is that it happens to support a different SIM standard. Anyway, as long as carriers can fill their network with the more profitable smartphone data plans, they have no incentive or obligation to drop their computer data plans to the point where the masses will find it attractive. They are doing what makes sense now to limit uptake with premium pricing. Maybe once they have excess capacity (with 4G, for instance), they will worry about making it up in volume. Anyway, compared to the pricing that is admittedly geared towards businessmen, the iPad’s 3G plans are much more consumer-friendly. Maybe still not compelling to any of us, but it’s a start.
April 7th, 2010 at 6:02 am
I guess you’re right — my only not-so-great point was that it would be cool if, once the card was in your netbook, the netbook could also handle telephone calls. All devices would be data voice, basically just different levels of portability.
I didn’t really think about it when writing the above comment, but I do remember people thinking that the only reason the SIM was a different size was because of the huge overlap with phone users who’d just swap it out…
April 7th, 2010 at 2:59 pm
I think the bluetooth PAN profile was envisioned as the perfect approach for this problem of multiple devices needing connectivity– my Q for instance could set up a bluetooth PAN with which multiple laptops could connect. Similar to the current mobile wifi router trend, but with the benefit of lower power consumption (albeit lower throughput, perhaps?). Anyway, it’s not as tidy as bluetooth DUN was, back in the day, which could be client-initiated instead of phone-initiated, but DUN is only 1:1 tethering.
April 7th, 2010 at 3:05 pm
As for your other point, that you’d like voice capability to transfer as well, pretty clearly, as the world transitions to VOIP, it will. I remember Nokia launched this strange SIM sharing bluetooth profile in which their phone send SIM info to the client device (say, a car speaker system), which would use it with their built-in radio. The only benefit I could think of, over the current handsfree profiles, were if the car system had better cellular reception due to bigger antennaes or something. But that would work well with your vision, Mike, if you could eventually shrink the SIM sharing device and strip out the cell radio completely, and maybe even implant it into your arm. Then it would just authenticate with whichever device you wanted to use, without necssitating a SIM card transfer.
April 13th, 2010 at 1:49 am
FWIW, the iPad doesn’t work with Yahoo Mail. Lot’s of elements just don’t load right, particular those that pertain to reading and writing emails. Looks nice enough otherwise though. What I don’t get is that all those sites that have an iPad specific webpage based on HTML5, why don’t those sites make that their main site? Wouldn’t we all benefit from having a more efficient non-flash experience even if we don’t have an iPad?
April 15th, 2010 at 3:00 pm
If you want those HTML5-friendly sites, change your user string to:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B334b Safari/531.21
April 22nd, 2010 at 4:27 pm
Just learned that you can hold down the comma key for an apostrophe! Not ideal, but at least it’s possible…
June 12th, 2010 at 7:50 pm
Believe it or not, today was the first day I made it to an Apple Store to play around with an iPad. Definitely fun to use, but coming from the Pre I’d say there are a few obvious shortcomings:
1) It needs gesture support. Really, it’s just so handy.
2) I’d gladly trade a compass for a magnetic charging back and dock. I’ve seen some Velcro-based homebrew workarounds, but it’s just not the same thing.
I’ve been toying with the idea of buying a tablet pretty much to use exclusively as a digital photo frame, but the iPad seems overkill for that. Still not sure how I would use it, so I’ll hold onto my $500 for now. The portrait keyboard was actually pretty usable, so that’s nice. The spacing works out just about.
I can definitely see the appeal, but not quite sure what I’d do with it.
June 13th, 2010 at 2:23 am
Did you use the portrait keyboard with just your thumbs while holding the iPad or did you use all your fingers, full keyboard style? Anyway, it’s a big ipod touch for better or worse. Touchstone-like compatibility would be great, but a magnet strong enough to hold the iPad would probably cause cancer :). Is it the back gesture in particular that you are missing? Is it really that much better than a back button (real or virtual)?
June 13th, 2010 at 3:40 am
It’s the location of the back button as much as anything, I suppose. For the keyboard, it was two thumbs. Fine for brief text entry, not sure I’d want to type long email on it. Probably right about the magnet, at last for holding it full vertical. Would be handy on those iPad stands they have in store.
June 13th, 2010 at 9:51 am
Isn’t the gesture area on the Pre in the same place as the button on the iPad? I don’t think that having gestures down there would be a big shift –but I think that implementing some multitouch gestures on the screen — like the 2, 3, and 4-fingered gestures on the Mac trackpads — would be great.
Still not sold on the touchstone being all that great, personally, for iPad or anything else. It comes down to putting the Pre/iPad in a specific location to charge, then either plugging in a connector or laying it on top of something. I’ve never understood the significant difference, besides the ability to mount the Pre magnetically in your car. My iPhone mounts fine with a dock connector in a cradle), and frankly, I wouldn’t want it held by a magnet on Boston’s potholed and bumpy streets.
And from the people I know who have an iPad, charging isn’t much of an issue, anyway.
June 13th, 2010 at 11:59 am
You’d feel differently if you had to charge your phone 10 times a day Mike, I guarantee you :). Anyway, as for the back gesture vs. on screen back button, seems like Jake would only need to get used to it’s placement (it’s usually on the upper left in most apps, right?). I like Back on the Pre because my thumb is never more than cm away from the gesture bar, when I’m using my index finger to poke around on the touchscreen (in portrait mode). On a larger screen device, that wouldn’t always be the case, so I don’t see a huge advantage to a bottom bezel placement. Moreover, Back is always awkward in portrait mode.
June 15th, 2010 at 10:11 am
Despite my better judgement, I have an iPad-sized amount of money burning a hole in my pocket, so I went yesterday to take another look, and see whether this was really a good idea or not. And I decided … not yet. The kicker for me was that after hearing (and virtually seeing) the new retina display on the new iPhone, I think the iPad will be much improved with this sort of screen. I think I could then use it as a real reading platform, and that would be kinda cool.
In other news, I had been pursuing a too-good-to-be-true 64GB 3G iPad being sold for $550 on Craigslist, advertised as being in Boston. Turned out to be a total scam operation, almost exactly like this one (they proposed using the same escrow/shipping company). Be careful out there!
June 15th, 2010 at 12:34 pm
Funny you should say that. I have it on pretty good authority that a high resolution iPad is on it’s way. My response was that it seemed superfluous, but that was before I was introduced to the “Retina Display” concept. It retrospect, it makes so much more sense 🙂
June 15th, 2010 at 1:33 pm
Glad to hear that! You should continue to pass along any “guesses” as to interesting new stuff before we make any purchasing decisions! 😉