My first 24 hours with my iPad 3G under the belt and so I figured i should probably provide my initial impressions. You mileage may differ....This was my initial experience.
The out of the box experience was disappointing, I opened the box peeled off all the protective skins and pressed the power button. The device sprang to life and commanded me to connect it to iTunes. I have to wonder why such a connected device needs to be tethered to breath it's first breath. i duly connected it and nothing happened. Nothing at all!. I concluded that perhaps iTunes needed an upgrade and this was so. About 30mins and two restarts later my new iPad was connected, filled out a few forms and we were synchronizing. Then i realized it was copying all my iPhone apps. Sure enough when I finally managed to untether it and start to play, I spent another hour removing all the apps that just did not belong on the iPad. Sorry apple, compared to the Kindle the out of box experience of the iPad was a bad one for me.
Playing around with the device I was impressed with the speed and responsiveness of the UI. Love that you can orient the device any way you want. Text entry is ok, the virtual keyboard is adequate but not sufficient to do real work and the typing position isn't ideal. Drawing is really finger painting, the control is minimal and the drawing apps I brought down had created controls (mainly sliders) that required ant sized fingers to select and move. I gave up. Perhaps adding a pen support might have been a good idea if this was an important design center for this device. I haven't tried the dictation or voice oriented applications which might help the input restrictions but there is something about talking to a screen that feels wrong. Talking to a phone is where I draw the line.
So basically this is a big iPod touch and this is the point, it really shines with applications that need that extra display surface to add punch. This means the experience of most consumption based apps that are available for both devices have been improved. Where the iPad really shines (and I think the design center) is book reading. Clearly this is the new commercial addition to the Itunes paid media family and this device was made for iBook. I was also surprised to find that the Kindle App worked very well too. Sans battery life this might be the Kindle killer. i can see the potential for better quality ebooks and ones that exploit more media and even context (see an earlier post).
Really wish it had a camera and better in the moment sharing facilities with the iPhone. Try sharing an image (given there is no camera on the iPad) the amazing Bump app doesn't work on the iPad the only shared service that works is iTunes which mean devices have to tethered to a specific itunes instance or possibly through iLife.In the end I found two essential apps if you the reader are stuck. iPad camera is very cool it connects the iPhone (iPad-touch) camera to the iPad as a remote device but falls short if you want to share images already capture on the iPhone. A second app was required to share captured images, the one I found was Pic-Z-Share.
So in summary, great consumption device, will banish my kindle to the drawer, and an average social device. Want to see a camera and possibly some kind of pen support or better drawing experience and more peer connectivity with other devices. And can we finally get away from the incessant tethering for these highly connected devices. The iPad is not an ambient device even though it is highly connected it is not the device I wont leave at home. it serves a thin vertical within my digital lifestyle, a convenient a capable media consumption device but I will be interested to see how future products and applications change this initial take
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Location:Aster Ln,Cupertino,United States
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