iPad First Impressions
I haven’t had time to sit down one-on-one with an iPad until about an hour ago. Luckily for me, NCSU’s library bought a bunch of them and are loaning them out to students for free. This was especially good because it comes without the promo software that the devices in the store have, and it wasn’t a friend’s personal device. Long story short, I could have my way with it and not feel guilty (or get arrested).
In the lead up to the iPad, Apple did its thing pimping the App Store as much as humanly possible – they even went as far as to make the iPad backward compatible with all existing iPhone applications. You could even run them in “double pixel” mode to get it to run full screen. Although this sounds great in theory, it was not at all what I had hoped for in terms of Apple-esque delivery. On the contrary, the apps built specifically for iPad – 3rd party and by Apple – were fantastic in their visual experience and supreme leverage of the newfound touch screen real estate. Observations are below.
Good
- SDK additions for new layout and program flow: the split column and “large view pane with small bar on side” approach both make for great experience with a large area for the important stuff and your necessary navigation always available. Pandora was fantastic, as was YouTube and other items like Settings and Address Book
- Responsiveness: rotation, touch, swipe and pinch, everything worked well and worked more snappy than the 3GS. Moving from an iPhone 2G to and iPhone 3GS yielded amazing results in overall experience – Apple has continued that with the iPad.
- Gaming: I played one game called Aurora Feint for about 5 minutes and was absolutely enthralled. Hats off to the game developer of course, but there’s something to be said about the iPad fitting into a nice form factor with 100% touch screen. Throw in stunning graphics and headphones and it’s a very inclusive gaming experience equal to that of a desktop computer. If I ever get back into gaming it may just be on the iPad.
Bad
- Typing: I’m not sure if I’ve yet to figure this out, but I now have iPhone and iPad both on my S-list for typing. I’m still at the library and the kid across from me is typing like a fiend as if his iPad were a keyboard. No clue how well he’s doing, but the lack of tactile response just plain sucked for me. The sad part is that I don’t know how or even if this will be remedied anytime soon – we may be seeing the raw limitations of efficient human input.
- Running iPhone-only apps: this just plain sucked as well. It’s literally a (double-pixel)-ing done with software with no sense of what/where text is, attempt at graphics interpolation, etc. They seem to have done it just say that “out of the box this thing runs 200,000 apps”. I’m not surprised, just upset that it was way oversold. Also, MapKit is broke in the Transloc App. Hopefully we’ll want to buy an iPad to fix this…
- Ergonomics: it’s cumbersome to hold. My only advice is to sit somewhere that you can prop your feet up with your knees highest in the air and rest it on your legs. I was able to have it rest part on my legs and part on the edge of the table that I’m at to form a pretty little 45 degree angle. My neck started to hurt after a little bit so I laid it flat on the table to use it after that.
That is all. I may buy one when the 3G version comes out in order to assess what we want to do with it in terms of Sound Around. My biggest interest, though, is how much of a development machine (or tool) I can turn it into. iPhone has been out for 3 years and hasn’t come up with anything to take the developer community by storm – I’m not going to make the same judgement for the iPad just yet.