I’ve had my new IPad 3G for a week. So, I thought I’d share my thoughts.
The iPad is the penultimate in convenience. It makes reading, email, and web browsing a breeze. I carry it around the house with me. I do all my reading on it; blogs, newspapers, and books. I use it to comment on blogs as well. I’m still getting used to the keyboard and have to say that part isn’t fun. I’m butchering comments on blogs and it’s taking far longer to leave one than I’d prefer. The keyboard is definitely going to take some getting used to. If I hit the “n” or the “b” instead of the space bar one more time, I’m gonna blow a gasket.
I do like the browsing experience on the iPad. Sites open up fast and they look great on the screen. For me, like everyone else, the lack of Flash is just frustrating. Beyond the lack of Flash, I miss the lack of browser plugins and extensions for mobile safari. I depend on a number of browser extensions in my day to day. The extra steps required with mobile safari drives me crazy. I wrote about this a while back. I think it’s critical to have the browser extensions and plugins for the iPad.
The apps which have been rewritten for the iPad work great. For me this is Evernote, New York Times, The Kindle App, Wall Street Journal, and WordPress to name a few. I’m writing this on a plane now, using the WordPress app. It’s great.
The apps that haven’t been rewritten, that’s another story. They are terrible. Apple tried to make up for their inability to fit full screen with a zoom feature, but it’s just not enough. The iPhone apps that haven’t been rewritten for the iPad are clumsy. Many don’t rotate to landscape. When you magnify to fit the screen the resolution is terrible. Everyday I go to the App Store in hopes of finding new updates. For most of my iPhone apps the process is definitely NOT happening fast enough.
Reading on the iPad is killer. I like iBooks, combined with The Kindle App. It gives me options. I am reading Mastering the VC Game by Jeffrey Bussgang and it wasn’t available on the Kindle but it was in iBooks. That made me happy. (Great book, I’ll post my thoughts on it soon.)
What I don’t like about iBooks is you can’t cut and paste. I like to capture quotes and post them to Tumbr. You can’t do that from iBooks.
The 3G works great. I’ve bounced between it and WiFi multiple times when the WiFi just wasn’t cutting it or vice versa. For this reason I am very glad I waited.
One unexpected irritation with the iPad is the smudging of the glass. Call me anal, but after a few hours of use, the glass is covered smudges and has to be wiped off. This bugs me. The screen resolution is gorgeous. It just looks sloppy after awhile if you don’t wipe it off. I now carry iKlear cloth with me everywhere.
After a week with the iPad I’m generally pleased with it. I like it. It’s fun and it’s definitely convenient. I now use my laptop less. I use my iPhone less for data. It’s the perfect middle device. It has met my expectations. Now if it can get a fully functioning browser and some Flash/HTML5 it could be the killer device.
Do you have one? What do you think?