January 28, 2010
By ANDY IHNATKO
ai@andyi.com
And now we hit Phase Two of Rumored Apple Ta ... sorry, iPad hype: in which the world attempts to review something that won’t ship for at least two more months, and which only a few hundred people have ever actually held and used.
The iPad is too different, and the day is too early, to make any sort of call on the success or failure of this thing. At worst, Apple will be faulted for atypical conservatism. At best, the iPad will be likened to the first Mac, which combined hardware and UI elements that were familiar on their surface, but which had finally been combined in the right way to produce a satisfying stew that everybody else will leap to copy.
Yes, dear readers, I promise that I shall review the holy hell out of this thing when I have one in hand. I will knock you down during recess and sit on your chest and pummel you with technical details and user experiences and opinions. Our teachers will pull me off of you and I’ll still be desperately kicking at you with speculations about the future of the platform and screaming “This isn’t over!!!” as I make dark promises of a series of follow-up reviews in which I discuss new iPad software.
So you have that to look forward to.
Until then, here are a few notes and impressions I collected during my fondle-time with the iPad and a sober morning after a full night’s sleep:
Physical Impressions
It has a feeling of being The Right Size. It’s smaller in your hand than what you might expect, which means that it feels manageable and easy to carry around. But it’s big enough that you don’t find yourself asking “what’s the point of having this and an iPhone or Android?”
This is no cheap hunk of netbook plastic. It’s glass and aluminum, fitted together very precisely, with a solid feel ... just like a premium MacBook. It’s neither obtrusively thick nor what you might call Delightfully Thin. I feel as though I could be rather bold in slinging this in a bag (whereas I always make sure that my Kindle is backed with something a lot sturdier than the ebook reader is).
As expected, there are practically no buttons and openings on the iPad. Just the usual assortment you’d find on an iPhone: Home, power, lock, volume up/down, openings for the speaker and the microphone, and a standard Apple dock connector. The connector is under the Home button, as on an iPhone. It’s going to be a small challenge to develop any kind of dock that allows you to use or view the iPad in landscape mode.
Its weight is just fine. I had no problem holding it in one hand as I worked the UI with the other, though for long periods — like reading a book — you’re going to want to two-hand it, or rest a corner on a table. When it’s on a table you can use both hands to input touch gestures — as in Keynote, when you’re sizing and rotating content for the screen — which is a real “welcome to the future” moment. It made me a bit sad that Microsoft Surface technology will never make it into consumer space. The first “light table” app for the iPad will do very well, I reckon.
The whole thing is sealed tight. The battery is hardwired in, but then you knew that when you saw the word “Apple” in front of “iPad.”
Battery life is promised as “10 hours.” Even when I cut that in half (my usual reaction to any manufacturer’s claim of real-world battery life) that’s more than enough for a flight from Boston to San Francisco. I suspect that it’ll be even enough that I can be brave about reading books for hours on the iPad without worrying about having nothing left when I need to do some email or write something.
Screen
The display is gorgeous — crisp, with strong color but lots of subtlety. A pro photographer friend with a best-selling photobook series told me he thought it was good enough to use as a commercial presentation portfolio. Do keep in mind that we were seeing the display under optimal conditions — a dim room draped in black curtains.
Viewing angles are immensely wide: it’s practically like a TV. Specs on the screen: 1024x768 at 132 dpi. This is lower resolution than the eInk display on a Kindle and other ebook readers. But I’d say it’s just as readable, if not more so. You do give up some dpi, but it’s backlit, the anti-aliasing is much better, and the OS does a much better job laying out the type.
OS and UI
This really is the iPhone OS. I tried every trick and technique available to me on the iPhone and it all worked…except for the Screen Capture trick (hold down the Power and Home button to take a screenshot).
My very first impression is that I’d like to see Apple give us a better version of Springboard (the application launcher). The iPad versions of the iPod, Mail and the photo viewer apps aren’t just scaled-up flavors of the iPhone editions. But that’s the feeling I get from Springboard on the iPad.
Apple’s iPad apps make terrific use of landscape and portrait modes. When you tilt Mail on its side, the UI changes from “looking at one long scrolling page of email” to “multipaned efficient processing of an Inbox” mode, so to speak.
I can’t really make much of a pronouncement about these apps but I was struck by the amount of restraint the apps’ designers used. A bigger screen increases the temptation to just keep adding interface elements. And yet it’s remarkably uncluttered. All of the features of a “real” spreadsheet are there, but there are appear to be fewer buttons and controls here than what you’d find on a typical Android tip-calculator app.
Keyboards
The iPad has soft keyboards available in both landscape and portrait modes. I tried typing on it in landscape mode, where the keyboard is almost full-sized. I have to say that it’s more touch-tappable than touch-typeable. Typing at my normal speed was ... unproductive. But if I slowed down, I could type very fast using both hands. It’s fine for writing emails, but probably poor for writing an essay or a column. Nonetheless I’m certain that I could do a whole 800-word column on the virtual keyboard without suffering too much.
The virtual keyboard doesn’t have to be as good as a real one, anyway. There are two options for mechanical keyboards: a keyboard dock that holds the iPad like an easel and incorporates a notebook-sized keyboard, and Apple’s standard wireless Bluetooth keyboard.
Keyboard Dock
I could type on the keyboard dock just as quickly as I can type on my MacBook ... and of course, the Pages app kept right up with me, keystroke for keystroke.
The keyboard dock sports a few extra iPad buttons, for reaching the Home screen, Photos, Search, and a Mystery Unlabeled White Button that I didn’t press for fear that a poison dart would be fired from the middle of the screen into my neck.
It also has a familiar Command key. Common keyboard equivalents for Cut, Copy and Paste are supported and I expect that other keyboard shortcuts will be supported in apps.
One disappointment: the keyboard dock doesn’t fold flat for travel. I suspect that on-the-go iPad users will want to give it a miss and either buy the Bluetooth keyboard, or wait for an enterprising third party to design a more travel-studly option.
Performance
Fast. Fast, fast, fast. I did absurd things, like zoom in and out of webpages with fast twitches of my finger tips. The iPad kept right up with me, millisecond by millisecond. When you drag something, you feel like you’re physically sliding a photo across a surface; no need to wait for the OS to catch up with you. When you turn the iPad, the screen switches display modes almost instantly.
This sort of responsiveness enhances the whole experience. In so many touch-based systems — yes, I’m flashing an impatient glance at Android devices — the interaction feels like “I have made an input gesture; the ebook reader app has received the ‘turn to the next page’ command; the computer is now rendering and displaying an animation of a page turning in this ebook.” On the iPad, it feels as though you put your finger on the bottom-right corner of the page and dragged that corner towards the spine of the book until it flipped over.
And of course, it plays HD video smoothly and smartly. HD video on a netbook is a pipe dream. Even many of the $500 notebooks I’ve tried can’t really handle any video that hasn’t been transcoded for low-bandwidth mobile playback.
iPhone Apps
The iPad’s support for existing iPhone apps is a mixture of Awesome and Awkward. In general, the only iPhone apps that won’t run on it are ones that require the device to be a phone. They all work great at original iPhone size (postage-stamped into the middle of the screen).
When you tap the "2X" button to scale the iPhone app to iPad dimensions, the results will depend on the app. Some rely heavily on bitmapped images and controls (like labels on buttons). The OS does its best to up-sample the graphics but there’s only so much that can be done.
But even an iPhone game scaled-up to iPad dimensions is a tantalizing glimpse of what HD gaming will be like on this device. Holding and twisting this big screen in your hands is an immersive experience.
Accessibility
Bravo to Apple: the iPad has plenty of features to aid people with low vision, such as full-screen zoom, a white-on-black display option, and Apple’s “VoiceOver” technology (which reads anything on the screen aloud). For the hearing-impaired, the media player supports closed-captioned content and the audio output can be remixed to mono.
Reflecting on the "magical day
It’s the Morning After. I’ve had a good night’s sleep, finally, and have also had the chance to wash the stink of a full day’s worth of coverage off of my battered body as well as the glitter and stardust that Apple sprinkles over the folks who attend its product announcements.
I’ve also been able to read some of the Internet’s first impressions of the iPad.
Let me address one thing straight away: anyone who declares the iPad a “fail” because the browser lacks support of Flash needs to elaborate their position beyond one word of a single syllable. Frankly, I think some people elevate flash-based Web content to the level of a fetish. Which isn’t far off the mark, given the kind of content that its fans stream from various video sites.
It’s true that there’s a lot of Flash content out there. But Flash – see Adobe's reaction to the lack of Flash support on iPad here – is in no way part of the true language of the Internet. It’s Scottish-accented English. Sometimes it makes the language more colorful and entertaining, and sometimes it just renders it into unintelligible mush.
Months ago, I installed a browser plugin for Safari called “ClickToFlash.” It blocks all Flash content. You’ll see a placeholder image in the webpage and if you want to view the content, give it a click and it’ll load in. I have not noticed any drop in my ability to enjoy the Web. What I have noticed is that my browser is faster and more responsive, and that I can leave a couple of dozen tabs and windows up for weeks without having to force-restart my Mac.
So I’m not worried about the lack of Flash. If there’s anything about the iPad design that concerns me, it’s the lack of an open file system, which the iPad inherited from the iPhone. Here’s a typical “Thank God I had my ASUS netbook with me” situation: I’m usually desperate to flee the scene of the crime after I’ve filed a column or an article. I grab my netbook and my car keys and soon I’m 30 miles away from my office.
I grab the netbook partly because I don’t feel like I’m free to go until all of my editors have gone home for the day. If there’s breaking news (or if someone just gets a Fancy Idea) I might have to write and file something on the spot. If I screwed up (like failing to forget that this isn’t 1932 and the Sun-Times can’t print a 3811-word review), then the piece I emailed from the office will be sent back to me and I’ll make cuts and improvements and send it back.
It’s easy to do this with a netbook. Download the file attachment from my editor’s email, cut 3000 words that were utterly essential to the story, then email it back. Or download the column from cloud storage and open it in my word processor. Or write a whole new piece and attach it.
On the iPhone, it’s almost impossible. I can create a new document in a word processor, but the Mail app can’t see into the word processor’s data area so I can’t do anything with it.
Every iPhone app that needs to share data with other iPhone apps or other devices on the Internet uses a different trick to get around this problem.
But instinctively I think that an app running on a $500 thing shouldn’t have to resort to tricks for something so basic. There are loads of tasks in which the simple ability to create a file, edit a file, and move a file someplace useful is key.
As a consumer, I’m hoping that the iPad will indeed be the One True Thing. You know, the device that does so much, and does it all so well, that it’s the only thing that I need to have with me when I leave the office. If, once I’ve had the iPad for a month, I find myself fleeing the office with the car keys, the iPad ... and my netbook just in case, then Apple will have failed. Pages — Apple’s $9.99 iPad word processor — is a treat to use. But it’s not useful to me if I can’t easily get documents into and out of it. Time will tell.
Withholding judgment
On the whole, I see no reason to peg the iPad as a success or as a failure. Which seems like a ridiculous thing to even point out at such an early juncture but it’s sometimes good to put it in writing. I’m as certain today as I was yesterday that any single-purpose device that costs more than $400 (like the Kindle DX) isn’t long for this world, though.
Otherwise, the release of the iPad marks a classic battle between two philosophies:
Is it better to have a device that is loaded with bullet-pointable features?
Or is it better to have a device that has a shorter list of specs ... but which does everything right?
That’s not a loaded question. It’s the key difference between the Android and iPhone operating systems. It’ll also define the difference between a netbook and an iPad. The former looks great on paper. The Apple product looks great when you’re actually trying one out firsthand.
Example: the iPad (like the iPhone) doesn’t multitask third-party apps. You can listen to music from the iPod app while you work on your mail, but you can’t listen to music streaming from a Pandora client. But on an iPad, switching between two apps is lightning-fast and intuitive, and if it’s anything like an iPhone, this “one third-party app at a time” policy will result in a far more stable computer.
An Android tablet does true multitasking. But this feature makes Android devices a little crashy, it slows down performance (sometimes to the point where you need to restart the device), and it really demands that you download and use a special app that does nothing but help you manage this herd of skittish and sometimes quite angry sheep.
These differences don’t mean that the iPad is under-featured or that an Android-based tablet is so backward that it might as well have been made from sticks and dried animal skins. It’s a difference in philosophy.
I like my netbook a lot. Most of my admiration for it comes from the knowledge of what I can accomplish with it despite its many limitations. “Wow, this keyboard and screen are useful ... they’re not as big as I’d like, but what would you expect from a machine this small?”; “This webpage loaded plenty quick ... of course, it’s a lot slower than what I’d get on a real notebook, but what do you expect for $300?” ... that sort of thing. Most of my admiration for the iPad comes from the fact that I left that demo room with absolutely no complaints about the speed, comfort, or simplicity of my user experience.
As such, I don’t imagine that the iPad will light the world on fire immediately. I suspect that the majority of purchasers — the average consumers — will buy one at a time when they were in the market for a pan-useful computer anyway. They’ll walk into the store with a cheap notebook or a good netbook in mind. But then they’ll think of the times they were in a conference room and saw a couple of people with iPads in front of them. Or they’ll think of that six-hour flight last month in which the guy across the aisle was on his iPad for as long as the flight crew would allow him.
And then they’ll give the iPad a try. Then and only< then, after a half an hour of tapping and dragging and tilting and reading, will a consumer really know what the right choice will be.
