iPad First Impressions

It’s just a bigger iPhone, right?

Hardly.

The iPad is a very interesting device. Upon picking it up, I was surprised at how light and sturdy it was. For having that much glass and battery capacity, it sure feels nice in the hand.

Let me talk about the issues we ran into first.

Google Maps was not working at all. No matter what I tried, I could only get a gray screen to show up with the pin of a landmark superimposed.

The iBooks app constantly crashed upon launch on one iPad.

I guess we’ll be seeing iPad OS 1.0.1 soon

Fingerprints showed up easily on the device. A microfiber cloth in the pocket will be a must-have accessory.

So the iPad has some launch day issues. What did I like about it?

Well, for one, the iBooks app made Elizabeth gasp when she saw the bookshelf. The books themselves look gorgeous. They paginate on the fly after you change the font size, and allow you to bookmark any word or selection. The bookmarks also show a contextual range of text, similar to the old Voyager electronic books series.

The iPad had the Netflix app but there was no assigned account so we could not use that.

I played with Numbers which was very nice. It took me awhile to get used to the user interface. I was trying to apply my experience from the Mac version of numbers to the iPad version and that was clearly the wrong approach.

Things look similar, for example tapping a cell brings up the selection handles. On the Mac, adjusting these handles will auto-fill in other cells to the newly selected cells. On the iPad version, you have to tap once to select, tap a second time to get a menu, select fill and then you get an entire different UI to fill. This new UI is reminiscent of the iPhone’s video trim interface.

Double tapping a cell gets you into edit mode. This is where things get very cool. The keyboard changes based on what you are editing, either a formula, numbers or text for example. This is very slick and a nice use of the virtual keyboard.

I didn’t get around to trying Pages and typing a lot of text. I am not a very good typist to start with, but the typing I did to enter urls and such went fine.

A couple of games for the iPhone, such as the Simpsons game, were on the device and ran well at twice their normal size, if not a little blurry. The blurriness in graphics was not very noticeable.

Safari was fantastic, although a little slow to load pages. I don’t know if that was the network at work or the iPad. I can safely say that double tapping to zip around web content is fantastic.

The calendar app is very nice. Elizabeth wanted to be able to swipe across the UI like a day planner to switch days.

Maybe not today, but someday I would like to own an iPad. I could tell that consuming content on an iPad will be a very intimate experience, and I think intimacy is what sets the iPad apart from a laptop or an iPhone.