I’ve finally had an opportunity to get my hands on an iPad. Because Apple has seen fit to place it’s closest store 6 hours away, hearing that my local college bookstore had some iPads in stock was kinda exciting. However, I can’t be too excited by it as I’ve already declared to my friends and co-workers that the thing is “just a giant iphone without the phone, or camera”.
Regardless, here are my impressions:
1) It’s smaller than I expected it to be. I guess I never really spent much time visualizing the dimensions of it. My wife also thought it was smaller than she expected
2) It’s not that heavy. I had read other people’s comments that is was heavier than they expected, but it was just about as heavy as I imagined it to be.
3) Pixel doubling didn’t look quite as horrendous as I had expected. I did not, however, try a pixel doubled app that had any substantial amount of text. I played a Simpsons fighting game, and a version of Rock Band.
4) You wouldn’t want to do a lot of typing on this thing. Typing without any tactile feedback is just about as rough as you would expect it to be. I’m not too sure I could get used to it. I’ve been doing it for about a year on my iPhone, but with the iPhone (and most mobile devices) there is the expectation that you are only doing minimal amounts of data input.
Overall the iPad looks like a really fun gadget which almost seems useful. I think it might be nice to read on, but I’m not sure a backlit document is the ideal reading device. I think it might be fun to game on, but I can’t see it becoming something I can play some of my favorite side scrollers on without some actual buttons (the same goes for the iPhone, actually). I think it might be convient to surf the internet with while relaxing, but I like to play flash games which aren’t supported. My wife loves those flash games even more, so without flash there is no way I can convince her that we should buy one of these.
Despite the negatives expressed above, the iPad is a pretty cool gadget. This is probably only something that you’ll appreciate once you have it in your hands, at least this was the case for me. It gets very close to being useful but never quite makes it. I’m sure that if I think about it enough I’ll concoct a reason to buy it, but for now my rational side won’t allow me.
