The iPad Review

In which I wax on most every­thing but books on the device.

It’s been over two weeks that the iPad has been on the mar­ket in the US. I’m writ­ing this post on the iPad, in fact, in a mov­ing car on the way to Canyonville, Ore­gon for a lovely week­end at the casino with the wife and fam­ily. Cause, noth­ing says ‘vaca­tion’ like the Seven Feath­ers for a fam­ily that doesn’t gam­ble or drink much.

As a strange aside, take a look at the Seven Feath­ers on Google maps; there is a crazy prox­im­ity to the ceme­tery right at the edge of the park­ing lot. I’m not much into the occult, but I saw Pol­ter­geist.

I have read what I have to imag­ine now amounts to all of the iPad reviews. I’ve read the early ones call­ing the iPad a silly also-ran in a soon to be sat­u­rated mar­ket. I’ve read the reviews call­ing the thing an over­sized iPod touch. I’ve read the ones call­ing it a game-changer, a mag­i­cal tool that will change the way we live, raise our chil­dren, tame lions, and ride bikes. As much as I’ve been long­ing to get a few words out on the device, I didn’t feel like I would be able to add much to the dis­cus­sion with­out actu­ally — you know — using it for a while. So, here we are. Two weeks in and I think, now, I have some­thing to say.

The Hard­ware

I’m on the record as being a fan­boy for Apple stuff. I’ve tried to shake that, but once I did the com­mer­cial, I really cemented the door closed on that whole objec­tiv­ity thing. What­ever. The truth is that the unbox­ing expe­ri­ence for Apple hard­ware is next to god­li­ness. You may be able to tell right now where the rest of this is going.

Apart from the Spar­tan and prac­ti­cal pack­ag­ing, the device itself exudes some­thing of a halo when you pull the lid from the box. That may be from the incred­i­ble shine of the per­fect screen. Don’t worry. That shine is soiled mere sec­onds later, just after you lay a sin­gle fin­ger upon it, when the smudge mag­net is acti­vated. If you’re look­ing to main­tain that per­fect shine, you’ll be wip­ing it with a soft cloth three min­utes for every one minute that you are actu­ally com­put­ing with it.

Its heav­ier than you expect at 1.5 pounds. I’m a for­mer kin­dle user and the one of the things that was decid­edly not annoy­ing about the kin­dle hard­ware expe­ri­ence was the weight of the device. I got used the feath­er­weight feel of the thing. Com­pare to the kin­dle, the iPad is a cin­derblock.

What comes with that weight, though, is a dis­tinct feel­ing of sig­nif­i­cance. This device is made solid, battle-ready. The block alu­minum hous­ing is smooth, baby’s bot­tom smooth. And, much like a baby, you wouldn’t want to hold this thing up high and wave it around a bunch, as it might just slip right through your fin­gers. This, I have to imag­ine, is a wel­comed coin­ci­dence for third party case mak­ers.

The thing is, the weight and tex­ture of this thing feels damned good to hold. After about a half hour of con­stant use, I found myself unable to let it go, unnat­u­rally stroking the back of it with my fin­ger­tips as I tap away with the other hand. This com­bi­na­tion of large screen, tex­ture, weight, and tem­per­a­ture is sim­ply heaven for tac­tile peo­ple like me. And, after the first day or so of get­ting used to the weight, mus­cle mem­ory has kicked in and it’s no longer a sur­prise just how heavy it is when I pick it up.

Speak­ing of things that are unnat­ural, this screen is amaz­ing. As has been widely reported, those that have touched iPad tend to be con­verts, and I found the same true for me. There’s no give to it — the large capac­i­tive glass is solid as stone and wildly respon­sive to each touch, far more so than the iPhone, in my expe­ri­ence so far. I’ve owned three iPhones so far, and each of them has had some sort of man­u­fac­tur­ing weird­ness at the point where the glass meets the body. Not so with the iPad; the seam is level, smooth and tight all the way around the face of the device.

Bat­tery life is a stun­ner. I con­sider myself a heavy user, and I’ve been work­ing hard to test the lim­its of this thing, and now, after two days of nor­mal use, includ­ing writ­ing sev­eral long doc­u­ments (this entire series included) I’m only just now at 40%. Movies. TV. Pod­casts. Office work. Through it all, it doesn’t get hot, and it pow­ers right on through.

It’s a joy to touch, so be it. But that’s not the real story of iPad. The real story of ipad is in the things that you can do with it.

The Soft­ware

I carry (car­ried) a Mole­sk­ine note­book with me every­where. I pre­fer the mid­dle size, with the grid rule paper. I use it for notes and sketches at meet­ings, free-writing, brain­storm­ing and map­ping, and for let­ting my kids bathe the thing in stick­ers.

When I first saw iPad, long before actu­ally touch­ing iPad, I knew I wanted to use it to replace my Mole­sk­ine note­book.

Out of the box, that’s impos­si­ble. Which is a shame, since the form fac­tor to me makes it such a nat­ural con­tent cre­ation device. The Apple-included apps really are rejig­gered iPhone and iPod touch apps. They look great on the big screen of iPad, but the don’t really add much new to the expe­ri­ence that changes the way you’re going to use a com­puter for­ever when it comes to cre­at­ing. In fact, in some cases, they went ahead and screwed — or roy­ally screwed — the way you expect things to work.

Things that are interesting

No doubt, Safari on iPad is a killer app. Brows­ing with your fin­gers is every bit the inti­mate expe­ri­ence that you never knew you wanted to have with the inter­net. You can think of that any way you need to. The thing is, it’s just plum dif­fer­ent, and this dif­fer­ent is good. I find what I’m look­ing for faster on the iPad than my lap­top, and thanks I think to the flat form fac­tor, I’m more engaged in the research on it. The modal nature of the iPhone OS is such that I find myself more focused and atten­tive to what­ever it is I’m look­ing for online.

Mail is a treat. With Mail, this thing has actu­ally made me more pro­duc­tive when I’m work­ing on my lap­top; I leave my email closed on the com­puter, and pick up my iPad to check mail when I head to lunch or cof­fee. I’ll talk about the key­board in more detail later, but suf­fice it to say that my typ­ing speed on this thing is such that I can get through even longer responses quickly and with no pain. The user expe­ri­ence eye candy in mail actu­ally adds to the mail expe­ri­ence, sup­port­ing user input rather than just show­ing it off. In land­scape mode, see­ing all your mail in the left col­umn, mes­sage in the right, is per­fect for quick fil­ing. But in por­trait mode, the mes­sage col­umn dis­ap­pears and you’re brought into just one mes­sage at a time. It’s funny, what hap­pens next: you feel like you’re read­ing each mes­sage on paper. It’s the expe­ri­ence you get when you used to print those super impor­tant emails so you’d have them for ref­er­ence later, or just wanted to make sure some­one else noted that you knew an email was impor­tant enough to print and pose on the cor­ner of your desk, all pol­i­ticky and full of snark.

Maps. Huge. Maps on the iPad is the app that you’re going to use out of the box to show your friends just how cool the iPad is. Pinch­ing and zoom­ing in the maps app is as close to the Minor­ity Report expe­ri­ence as you can get on the device. I
t’s totally intu­itive, an exten­sion of your brain, and thor­oughly exer­cises the full def­i­n­i­tion of the Google imagery. In street view, on this big iPad screen, you can almost make out my license plate num­bers. It’s that good.

Things that are not as great as we were led to believe

There is a lot right with the iPad. This is stuff that is just not right enough that I don’t find myself giv­ing it much thought.

• Cal­en­dar. Con­tacts. Notes. Func­tion­ally unin­spired. None of these apps bring any­thing new to the table, and in fact regress not a lit­tle bit. Now, they look more like paper, but they don’t bring me the feel of paper, or the abil­ity to inter­act with the ele­ments on the page like paper. In notes, for exam­ple, why can’t I type some­thing, then draw some­thing on the page right next to the note? Do Apple engi­neers ever draw?




• Pho­tos. It’s ok. If you have nice pho­tos, you can really show off the device. If you don’t, you’ll have plenty of fun swip­ing and pinch­ing your way through your images, but oth­er­wise, the pho­tos app didn’t add much over the iPhone ver­sion of the same.




• Cam­era. Oh. Wait. There’s no damned cam­era. As a pho­tog­ra­pher, I wish this thing had a cam­era, what with all the really won­der­ful apps for work­ing with images that exist on is plat­form. The omis­sion of a cam­era adds steps to the photo process that are just trou­ble­some enough that I don’t find myself actu­ally using pho­tos much on this thing.

Things that are screwed, roy­ally screwed, or buggered

Some things on the iPad, just a few of them, have to be keep­ing some engi­neers up all night.

Han­dling files. Hands down the most un-Apple design I have ever expe­ri­enced. It’s truly as if some engi­neer sat down and delib­er­ately designed a sys­tem for han­dling files that would cause user pain, frus­tra­tion, and con­fu­sion. It’s a fun­da­men­tal step back­wards that comes as a weird by-product of the Finder-free modal inter­face.

Here’s the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion, for those who haven’t seen it. And to get the real feel­ing for it all, you have to put your­selves in this men­tal space: with Pages for word pro­cess­ing, Keynote for pre­sen­ta­tions, Num­bers for spread­sheets, each one an able tool for office doc­u­ments, you feel like you are being encour­aged by Apple to use this thing as an Actual Com­puter. That’s the sce­nario. One you should be com­fort­able with because, you know, you’ve been encour­aged to work with office-type apps for the bet­ter part of three decades.

So you plug in the iPad, install the appro­pri­ate apps and think to your­self, “Ok, so now I want to work on this thing, this doc­u­ment thing. How do I ever com­mu­ni­cate with the iPad that I want to get this doc­u­ment thing into it?”

(I hon­estly don’t think they got around to ask­ing that ques­tion dur­ing iPad devel­op­ment. There is sim­ply no way that peo­ple who are that smart, who turn out such incred­i­ble prod­ucts and soft­ware, could come up with the fol­low­ing boat anchor.)

Open iTunes. Sync iPad. Click on iPad in the devices list in iTunes. Click on apps tab. Scroll down to obscurely hid­den doc­u­ment well, which includes a list of apps that are cur­rently installed on the iPad which can han­dle doc­u­ments. Pages will be listed here. Click on Pages, then click the add but­ton, or find your doc­u­ment and drag it into the doc­u­ment well. The iPad will sync instantly. So, I guess, there’s that.

Now, it’s bad enough that there are so many steps involved here. What’s worse is this: when you add a doc­u­ment to the iPad, you’re cre­at­ing a ver­sion of it. Yes, your orig­i­nal will still exist on your com­puter. So if you go work on it on your iPad, then put it back on your com­puter, you have to make sure you delete and replace that orig­i­nal file with the new ver­sion. Lest we for­get that we live in an era when the great inno­va­tions include Google Docs, Drop­box, Box.net, and so many other cloud based col­lab­o­ra­tion tools. That this tool and the asso­ci­ated apps omit the abil­ity to sync, work, and save in the cloud is more than just annoy­ing. Even Apple’s own iWork.com ser­vice cre­ates a new ver­sion, though you can tell it really wants to be able to do so much more. Thank­fully, many of the above ser­vices are work­ing hard to fill in this obvi­ous short-coming.

And on that last point, we get to the real promise of the iPad, some­thing Apple has been curat­ing and cul­ti­vat­ing and con­di­tion­ing all of us to accept: the third party apps.

The Apps

The first appli­ca­tion that I paid for and used on my iPad was iMock­ups. It’s a rapid wire-framing tool used to sketch out web­site designs very quickly and send them off to clients. When I saw the demo video, three days prior to actu­ally own­ing the iPad, I knew this one would be in my arse­nal. I do too many of these things each week not to see if this would be that first great thing on the new device.

Within two min­utes, I’d sent my first wire­frame to a client for review. Two min­utes.

I do a lot of things pretty fast on the com­puter. I like to think I have a pretty good con­nec­tion to it and can turn out good work on dead­line, more often than not. But this was a dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence — pinch­ing, squeez­ing and draw­ing my way to a wire­frame pro­vided a whole new way to engage with what I was doing. It was a fast, almost direct con­nec­tion between what was in my head and what I wanted on the screen.

It’s a bizarre expe­ri­ence, to be sure. And not every app deliv­ers on this promise of direct con­nec­tion to your cere­bral cor­tex.

For exam­ple, I men­tioned ear­lier that I was look­ing to recre­ate the expe­ri­ence I have with my Mole­sk­ine note­book. I wanted a sim­ple appli­ca­tion that would allow me to draw and type, ide­ally some sort of hand­writ­ing cap­ture (not recog­ni­tion, mind you, just cap­ture) and a quick way to take those notes and pipe them back onto my Mac for pro­cess­ing and archive.

You would think that I was ask­ing for a cure for can­cer. And, actu­ally, the results are about the same for both: there is great promise, but no option that really nails the prob­lem on all fronts, and in the end are dis­ap­point­ing.

I’ve tried a dozen or so of the jour­nal­ing appli­ca­tions in the App Store now and the clos­est I’ve found is Ghost­writer for iPad. It has draw­ing, and within a few taps, hand­writ­ing cap­ture. It offers mul­ti­ple note­books to keep con­tent orga­nized. The hand­writ­ing cap­ture is off-the-charts clever; when you acti­vate a pen tool, a large mag­ni­fier pops up in which you write with the tip of your fin­ger, which is copied at a more rea­son­able size where your cur­sor sits on the page. It also crashes a lot. A lot, a lot. And it typ­i­cally crashes just after you’ve writ­ten a full page of notes, at which point, you want noth­ing more than to take an iPad in the face, which would be far less pain than the pain of los­ing all that work. Or at least, that was my expe­ri­ence.

Ghost­writer is a great exam­ple of an app that is test­ing the bounds of what the iPad inter­ac­tion mechanic is capa­ble of. And for that, some early bug­gi­ness is cer­tainly for­giv­able — that the devel­oper had this app in the store on open­ing day with­out hav­ing tested it on an actual func­tion­ing iPad is laud­able. All the day-one devel­op­ers deserve great respect for turn­ing out gen­er­ally ter­rific soft­ware with­out a lot of time and tools needed to do so prop­erly.

Not all apps have been so buggy on day one. Another hole to fill for me early on was Google Reader. While Google did an admirable job updat­ing the mobile inter­face for Gmail for large screen mobile devices like the iPad, they haven’t got­ten around to updat­ing the Google Reader web inter­face. While I use Google Reader on the web when I’m on my Mac, the iPad called for an app.

I tried Early Edi­tion first. Very clever inter­face, but slow slow slow in as a ver­sion one, and no sync with Reader, though word from the devel­oper is that Reader sync is com­ing very soon. For now, no dice.

N
ext was Feed­dlerRSS. Syncs with Google Reader, but the way it spawns in-app browser win­dows made nav­i­ga­tion tough for me to wrap my head around. It is a solid app, to be sure, just not for me.

I finally landed on Net­NewsWire. At $9.99, it was the most expen­sive of the lot, but worth every penny. Excel­lent sync with Reader, no crashes, and an intu­itive inter­face that had me brows­ing, star­ing and shar­ing sto­ries in no time. It’s a sim­ple app that brings fan­tas­tic util­ity to read­ing RSS feeds, and hav­ing them on the iPad reju­ve­nates the whole con­cept of RSS as a tool for any­one who needs to engage in a lot of con­tent quickly.

And such is the nature of the app ecosys­tem right now. Name a tool you’d like to use, and there will be three apps that fit the bill. One of them that nails it, and two oth­ers that just don’t. Unfor­tu­nately, App Store pric­ing is a bit of a wild west. Rather than the quick race to the base­ment that we’re see­ing in the iPhone side of the house, iPad apps are more expen­sive, so the cost of casual explo­ration starts to smart after not too long.

We’re already see­ing the surge of the next wave of iPad apps hit­ting the store that illus­trates the pace of evo­lu­tion tak­ing place now that devel­op­ers have devices to use, test, and play with. So far, it’s promis­ing, since with­out the apps, this device has no future.

And that really is the bot­tom line. The future of the iPad is in the hands of the devel­op­ers, and Apple knows it. After using the device for a while, you get the feel­ing that Apple’s apps are proofs of con­cept for what is pos­si­ble, tip-toeing along the line that sep­a­rates clev­er­ness from util­ity, wait­ing for devel­op­ers to unleash the real inno­va­tion. The iPad is not a device. It’s a plat­form. It’s a plat­form with enor­mous promise, but it’s still a plat­form.

The Ver­dict

No way. I was taught bet­ter than that. No, I think every­one should have a shot with this thing, to be sure. And now, just a few weeks in, I think I can safely say that it’s right for me — that it’s find­ing its place in my gear ecosys­tem, and that is help­ing me be more pro­duc­tive, more quickly. But there is clearly a lot to learn, a lot to cre­ate out there. My only mes­sage in this first post is a two-parter. For those who don’t like Apple, don’t want this prod­uct to suc­ceed because you think the iPhone has gone too far, what­ever: you peo­ple need to wait for the Courier. It’ll be per­fect for you. If it ships.

For every­one else: I don’t know how this will turn out yet, but Apple has changed the world again. They’ve done it because with iPad they’ve got­ten the right peo­ple at the right com­pa­nies think­ing. They’ve done it because they’ve inspired a new horser­ace around glass. They’ve done it because in the last three years they’ve con­di­tioned us to a new world of tap­ping, and in doing so have changed the way you will com­pute for the next 100 years.

They’ve done it because for the first time in 25 years, Apple has main­streamed a tech­nol­ogy that fun­da­men­tally changes the phys­i­cal­ity of our inter­ac­tion with data. Your next com­puter might still have a key­board, but it’ll seem anti­quated next to what you can do by sim­ply reach­ing out and giv­ing it a lit­tle tap.