On one hand, my smartphone has a touch screen and fits in my pocket, and on the other, my laptop has a physical keyboard and a large screen. Apple’s iPad brings together the strengths of both, except for the superior typing provided by laptops. Somewhere between these two lies Apple’s iPad, which provides the immediacy, simplicity, and tactile interaction of a smartphone, and the size, complexity, and greater expressiveness of a laptop. With it, I can graze the Internet with little thought or preparation. Little tasks now take little effort. The immediacy and depth of apps and the powerful feeling of touch interaction is compelling and delightful. It enables a whole class of computer interactions that I wasn’t using my laptop for because it was too inconvenient. It’s great for consumption, like movies, music, books, and the Web. It’s also great for certain kinds of creation, like painting and probably other typical mouse-driven things. I think it will completely replace my laptop on plane trips, in coffee shops, on the couch, and the like, which narrows my laptop’s usefulness quite a bit. It’s hard to quantify the value of these things, and if you compare the iPad to a laptop, it’s going to lose in terms of features, independence, and typing. You can get by with a laptop cheaper than the iPad, and for that reason the iPad is a convenience, not a necessity. It delivers a subset of the laptop, but it opens new doors for how we use computers. It’s just one of those things that you have to see and feel to believe.
I’ve had my iPad for almost a week. It arrived packaged in the usual delightful Apple packaging that oozes style and elegance. It was a pleasure to unwrap and to hold for the first time. It feels good in your hands: solid, glossy, curved, and beveled. But it feels a little too heavy if you hold it in one hand for a couple of minutes. The screen is bright, sharp, and responsive, and interprets my finger touches and motions very accurately. It starts up and shuts down quickly, just like the iPhone, and opens onto a beautiful interface, like the iPhone. The operating system is practically the same, except for different settings that reflect the different hardware, and also revised built-in apps by Apple that take full advantage of the extra screen space, like Safari and Mail. Taking more into account user’s inclinations to use the device in both orientations, most programs adapt to the device’s orientation and display more or fewer things, or the same things in a different way, to best fit the orientation. Built-in apps for the iPhone, like weather and calculator, are strangely missing and are missed. I can only assume this was because they didn’t have time to port them all, so they left out some. (It would be embarrassing to include jumbo-size versions of the iPhone counterparts and not take advantage of the iPad’s larger size.) The videos part of the iPod app has been inexplicably pulled out into a separate Videos app. You still can’t manage your podcasts on the device alone–deleting old episodes, downloading new ones–like you can with apps themselves. The interface for managing which apps you want on just the iPad is straightforward and natural, and iTunes nicely distinguishes between iPhone and iPad apps.
When I first used my iPad, I already had in mind a slew of apps I wanted to install, but the App Store kicks you out to the home screen when you install an app. You have to reopen the App Store and reload everything to search for the next app.
There are a few iPad app gems out there, among them iBooks, Tweetdeck, Dictionary, ABC Player, NYT Editor’s Choice, Marvel Comics, and Bloomberg. Others have compelling content, but are terribly designed. I’m afraid that the extra screen space has expanded software makers’ ability to screw up a good thing. With the iPhone, the screen is small, and a lot of apps follow Apple’s design because there aren’t a lot of choices for how to present things. With the iPad, I’ve seen apps have controls (buttons, text boxes, etc.) with custom looks and feels that are confusing and don’t work well. Apple has opened the floodgates to stylistic experimentation and differentiation that we see on PCs (especially Windows), and now we’re stuck again with interface design being more of an art form than a straightforward process, and hence more frequently done wrong. The Netflix app jumps to mind here. If it weren’t against the Apple Developer terms, I’d say it was a direct, mechanical port (somehow) of its web site interface to an iPad one. It’s slow, it hangs, it thinks I’m clicking an item when I scroll my movie queue, and the horizontal four-at-a-time browsing controls don’t follow my finger motions correctly. It’s god awful. But it’s a damn good video player, and it draws from a respectable pool of content, so at least it delivers what it promises.