A week with my iPad

I figured after a week with an iPad, it was time for a few initial impressions. Does it live up to the promise?

In a word, yes.

One of the biggest questions I get at the Apple Store from customers is, "What's it for?" In other words, most people have an idea of what it can do, but why would they use this instead of a laptop? What can a laptop do that the iPad can't, and is there value in owning both?

To understand the iPad, you have to go back a few years. Around the time the iPhone came out and revolutionized touch-based devices, Asus launched their extremely popular eeePC line of tiny "netbooks". These devices, much smaller, lighter, and cheaper than a full-on notebook PC, were popular for their portability and disposability. They were sluggish doing anything beyond basic word processing, emailing, and light web browsing, but Asus correctly figured that that's what most people spend most of their computing time doing, anyway. I was graciously given an eee 901 by Sara for school, and have loved it--much better taking that to school than a 15" MacBook Pro, full of delicate components and a $2000 loss if anything were to happen to it (the Asus cost $200, for comparison).

Not long after, the tech industry began to wonder when Apple would get in on the act. But Big Steve publicly decried netbooks on multiple occasions, saying Apple didn't know how to make a sub-$500 computer that wasn't "a total piece of shit." (His words, not mine.)

See, Apple's MO has been to wait to do something until they can "do it right." But once they do, they usually blow the competition out of the water, or so many people believe.

But netbooks tend to cannibalize sales of more expensive, more profitable devices. They're built on razor-thin margins. And that's not how Apple has been known to make its money, as a self-styled "premium brand." Apple would wait until they could perfect a device that would do what people do on netbooks (and better), but limit its uses strategically so that one would still at the end of the day need another computer to experience its full benefits.

The iPad, then, is Apple's netbook-that's-not-a-netbook. It's got what's to love about a netbook:
- Cheap: You can have one for $500.
- Light: it weighs a pound and a half.
- Speedy: Its flash memory means the computer boots up and shuts down in seconds.

It also fixes a few problems with netbooks:
- Despite the fact it's a virtual keyboard, in landscape mode the iPad is as roomy to type on as a full-size laptop.
- The battery lasts, real-world, ten to twelve hours. This is largely due to what the iPad *doesn't* do (run a full-on operating system, multitask, run Flash)
- Surfing and watching video on the iPad is fantastically speedy. On a netbook, it's a "tap down, wait two seconds for the page to follow" affair.

But it's not perfect. What needs fixing:
- There needs to be a soft-keyboard solution for text-modifying shortcuts, i.e. the equivalent of Command-i for "italicize" on my Mac, or Command-b for "bold." As it is, you have to hope the app developers included a menu option somewhere to let you italicize, bold, or underline, and when it's there, it's anything but intuitive. I imagine pairing the iPad to a Bluetooth keyboard fixes this, but I haven't tried it.

- Needs a direct way to add new words to the spellcheck dictionary. I think if you type something enough, it'll eventually learn it, but in the meanwhile, you have to let it auto-correct and then re-type it the "wrong" way a thousand times before it stops fixing it.


At the end of the day, most of the iPad's lingering issues revolve around productivity use, which is what it's mostly not been designed for. Where it shines is in using it for a few minutes of downtime, every hour, to check your email and surf, then throw it in your sling bag and go about your day; then come home at the end of the day and read it like a magazine while heating up your dinner. Throw a TV show on or read a book on it in bed, then plug it in to recharge the battery that got your through the whole day.

-- Posted From My iPad

Oh, and the whole Flash issue? Totally not a big deal. I can count on one hand the number of times I've hit a wall while surfing, now that most the sites I visit have HTML5 compatible video in anticipation of the iPhone/iPad onslaught of visitors. Just waiting for The Daily Show site to go iPad-friendly now.