I’ve had the Apple Ipad in my fat little hands for under 24 hours now and well, the fact that I’m NOT typing on it to write this review should speak volumes. Let’s go back in time and see how I got to this point.
I had an old Windows XP Tablet PC. it was a 12 inch model, single core processor and was heavy. It was pen-based (yup a stylus pen as your only way to input on a touch screen), it had no CD or DVD drive, and it put out enough heat to warm my bed on cold wintery days. It had full access to anything on the web I could throw at it (including flash based sites), it did not have a camera but it had USB ports and a docking station so you could add one — or any usb peripheral. Again, it was huge, it was heavy, the battery life sucked (2 hours if you were lucky), but it could multitask and do what I wanted it to do. It had a cool comic book application, but that application was limited and never made proper use of the screen so you wouldn’t have to zoom in or zoom out to see the entire page. It did a lot of things, but in the end it was too big to lug around and was too slow to do any serious projects with.
I also had an Ipod Touch from the last year (not sure what that model is). It was small, it was fast, and it was an Ipod touch. I never used the darn thing for music but everything else seemed to work okay… except the screen was too darn small to use to read ebooks, watch movies comfortably, or read comic books on without a TON of scrolling from panel to panel.
So I had two things… when I only really needed one thing that combined the best of the two worlds. Enter the Ipad.
Actually, enter a friend who needed a computer for her 8 year old and an Ipod touch to put in her purse for use in the car who traded me both for an Ipad … and a month ordeal that I’ve whined about on Facebook to get a 3G Ipad. For those who didn’t follow (or have learned to block) my status updates, Apple loves to take your money but is having trouble fulfilling orders for Ipads. Paired with Fedex, who got my Ipad from China to New Jersey in 20 hours… only to sit in warehouses for THREE DAYS before getting it to me… it was a bad customer experience and makes me wary of buying anything else from Apple unless it is verified in stock at a store or online retailer.
They did surprise me by having the thing here before noon on a Monday. Which was pretty nice since I’m not scheduled to work on Mondays and was looking for something to do.
So here are my initial thoughts:
The box was heavy but sparse. Inside you get the Ipad, a USB cable, a converter to make that USB cable a power cord, two apple stickers and a single sheet telling you to turn it on, plug it into itunes and away you go. The rest of the box was padding to keep it in place.
The unit itself looks like a really big Ipod touch. However, it has more buttons and it’s big (almost 10 inches) and feels almost as heavy as my old Tablet PC. However, it’s not quite as thick as my HTC Touch Pro 2 phone. The screen is pretty nice and my goodness, they added a button to keep the screen from flipping orientation whenever you made the slightest move. This is a great improvement over the Ipod touch as reading in bed was a nightmare.
So I plug the unit in. Remember, no instructions here, which, I find out, is not a good thing. I go to register the device and it offers to back up from my old Ipod Touch’s backup. I say okay and… nearly an hour and a half later, it has restored my device to reflect the old Ipod Touch’s settings. Except none of the applications work. It won’t connect to the Internet and I’m swearing at Apple because I haven’t even been able to play with my new toy as of yet.
I’d find out that Itunes stores any application you’ve ever downloaded for whatever devices you have so restoring from an older device isn’t necessary. I ended up having to factory reset my Ipad and setting it up as a brand new device and… away we go.
It downloaded a 480mb patch on its own as I was playing around with the App store and figuring out what applications I wanted to transfer over to the Ipad. Remember the days when the Apple crowd used to mock Windows because Apple devices were perfect out of the box and didn’t need patches or updates or anything to bog you down? Yeah. I rolled my eyes at them then and I rolled my eyes at them now as my machine was stuck downloading a gigantic patch before getting to play with it.
Now three hours into ownership, haven’t had a chance to use the darn thing yet.
Patch downloaded, apps loaded, I filled it with movies either converted from MPEG-2 files I created from hooking my Tivo to my computer or (gasp) ripped from my own DVDs. Playback is nice but I did notice distortions in the MPEG-2 conversions. It seems that the quicktime conversion wasn’t the best so the playback was slightly distorted. Former DVDs worked like a champ on the screen and any fuzziness was from the compression provided by the ripping software to get it off of the DVD.
The display is 4:3 instead of widescreen so widescreen movies display black bars on the top and bottom of the screen just like your old (pre-hi-def widescreen) TV would display them. Things are fairly crisp, the sound is okay out of the built-in speaker.
The Comic Zeal application for Ipad is pretty good. Most comics I threw at it worked and fit in landscape mode for two page spreads without having to scroll around to see each panel or zoom in to read the words. Image/Marvel Comics’ “Powers,” which was HORRIBLE to read on the Ipod Touch due to its seemingly-random layouts, was easy to read. “Knights of the Dinner Table” was a joy to read as the whole page fit either in landscape or portrait mode. I haven’t tried my own comics on it yet (since they’re PDFs) but I will in part two of the report.
I downloaded the Bento database creator for it and was really impressed. I was apple to set up a complex database to keep track of my movies and making entries was intuitive and fast. To me, that database software was worth the purchase price of the device as I know I’ll probably be using it on a daily basis to keep track of my movie lists.
I took a bath with it. I know, I know, gross to my naked body, but baths are my way of escaping from the world. The old tablet PC was actually a good size to rest on your legs as they were propped up in the bath. However, the unit had a limited battery life, got hot, and fumbling around with a pen while trying hard not to drop the darn thing in the water was not the greatest experience in my life.
The Ipad was a good size, using a finger to scroll through most applications was easy and I never felt like it was ever going to somehow leave my lap and fall in the water.
I tried the Kindle application for the first time and while the words were easy to read, I did notice that they were a bit fuzzy on the screen. I don’t know if it’s Apple’s fault or Amazon’s fault but the display was no where near as good as the one on my old Tablet PC.
Typing, in and out of the bath, is a chore. The Ipad does have a relatively big on-screen keyboard compared to that of the Ipod Touch. It’s also a great improvement over the tiny on-screen keyboard that came with my tablet PC. However, I have yet to figure out how to hold the device and type. I end up holding it with my left hand and typing with my index fingers. I don’t see how I’m ever going to do any serious typing on it, but again, these are first day impressions.
So the verdict so far? It’s nice. However, if it weren’t for the Bento application, I would have felt cheated by the price I paid for it. It’s just a big Ipod Touch. It’s NOT magical. It’s not going to set my world on fire but it is a nice combination of the two devices I replaced. This may change as I use it more.
Speaking of, tune in tomorrow for part two of this mini-review. I’m going to take it in the car and maybe even play around with the 3G (well Edge network up where I live) wireless abilities…
See you then!