Tumblring through the looking glass

The iPad: Initial impressions

by David on Apr.10, 2010, under Tech

I got a chance to spend a few hours with an iPad yesterday. A friend of mine got one at launch, and was kind enough to let me play with it for a while (thanks, Dave!). The test drive was fun, but it was also illuminating to talk to somebody who’d actually been living with one.

So, here’s my initial impressions, in no particular order:

1. The touch is amazing.
The touchscreen on the iPad is nothing short of amazing. Highly responsive and accurate, using the iPad highly tactile. When you’re scrolling a web page, it feels like you’re actually grabbing the page and moving it around. Painting and graphing apps are remarkably immersive, because things respond much like actual physical objects.

Touch-based phones also have this quality, but on the iPad it’s greatly amplified. Because of the much larger screen, the experience is far more spatial. There’s not as much zooming, and the motions are larger and more expansive. Combined with the smooth glass and aluminum body, the iPad has a physicality that I’ve never experienced in any other computing device.

2. Web browsing is highly broken
While navigating web pages is wonderful, there’s an extraordinary amount of stuff that doesn’t work. Flash doesn’t work, of course, and that alone is enough to cripple the machine. However, there’s a lot of other things that are missing that you wouldn’t necessarily expect.

Many scroll bars don’t work. The keyboard doesn’t always come up for text boxes. There’s no way to search for a word on a page. Those are just the things that I found in a short test drive, and I’m sure that there’s more lurking. Considering that Apple’s pushing HTML5, it was also shocking how many webapps were totally pooched on the iPad. For example, Google Wave crashes the whole damn browser.

I would say that the iPad gives you 75% of the web, but that remaining 25% has things that you’ll really miss. This will probably get better in the future, but right now it’s pretty irritating.

3. The screen is great (for some things)
The iPad has a gorgeous IPS screen, with rich colors and high contrast. Videos and comics are incredibly vivid. If Marvel and DC release their full libraries on this thing, I might buy one just as a comics reader. Magazines also benefit, as well as anything photography-related.

However, it’s not a great e-reader. The bright light of the LCD was irritating for long-form reading. I don’t think I’d want to read a novel on it, and the Kindle or Nook is still a better choice for the dedicated book reader. I’ve also heard that the iPad screen is hard to read and overly reflective in direct sunlight. I believe it, but I didn’t get a chance to test it myself.

4. The ergonomics suck
One of the first things that you notice about the iPad is that it’s heavy. 1.5 pounds doesn’t sound like a lot, but you really feel it when you’re handling the iPad. If you try to hold it one-handed like a book, then your hand and arm will tire. Two handed is better, but then you don’t have a hand free to touch the screen.

This is your cue to call me a wimpy computer nerd, too feeble to lift a pound-and-a-half. This is true, and my frail bird-like body is a great source of personal shame. However, it’s also true that human beings aren’t built to hold things in front of them. Try this simple experiment: raise your arms directly out in front of you, and hold that pose for a minute. Now imagine you’re holding a big book in each hand. Not painful, but not exactly comfortable either.

To make things more comfortable, you’ll want to rest the iPad on something. However, if you put it down on a table, then the screen lies completely flat. You’ll want to tilt it up towards you, but then you’re back where you started. This is why virtually all photos of the iPad show people with their knees up. It’s one of the only truly comfortable positions for holding the device. The curved aluminum back doesn’t help either.

The Apple case fixes a lot of these problems. It’s got a built-in stand that props up the iPad at a useful angle, so you can put the iPad down on a flat surface and use it kind of like a keyboard-less laptop. However, then you’re locked into the horizontal orientation and it becomes awkward to flip into portrait mode.

I foresee a ton of stands, cases, and holders being sold. The bare iPad can be a pain in the butt.

5. Input is painful
Speaking of butt-pains, text entry on the iPad was horrible. I’m sure it’ll get better with time, but for now it’s pretty bad.

Perversely, the most egregious flaw is that it’s so close to being great. The virtual keyboard is large enough that you can kinda-sorta type on it at a pretty good clip. Some keys are placed funny, and there’s a bit of a learning curve, but once you get used to it you can fly along at 20-30 wpm or more.

However, if you try to type at that speed, your error rates are going to be massive. The auto-correct constantly kicks in, and if you don’t stop it mid-word, then it will silently “fix” your input. There are similar problems with the auto-capitalization. Of course, you can’t touch-type, so you’re looking at the keyboard while auto-correct silently screws up your text. This shows up a surprising amount, especially with things like email addresses and place names.

You won’t notice any of this if you’re a hunt-and-peck typist, but if you do any serious typing then you absolutely need to get a bluetooth keyboard or the keyboard dock. Or just stick to a laptop, since you’re going to be lugging around a keyboard and screen anyways.

6. There are some amazing, innovative applications. There are also not enough of them.
The dedicated iPad apps are often exceptional, beautiful, and useful. Brushes is a lot of fun, and I can see a lot of genuinely interesting art being done on the iPad. As stated before, the comics applications are fantastic, and I can foresee a lot of cool photo software being made. Omnigraffle is excellent. The large touchscreen opens up a new world of possibility for developers, and it’ll be neat to see what emerges.

However, there’s a lot of applications that don’t exist, and probably never will. To start with, every application is an island, and unable to communicate with other applications on the machine. So, if you want an app that grabs things from your DropBox, and another app that reads PDFs, you can never combine the two to read your DropBoxed collection of technical manuals. Apps that enhance other apps are unlikely to emerge, so you won’t have things like Photoshop plugins.

Apple is also in the habit of banning applications from competitors, so you’ll never have Google Voice, Google Nav, a Flash player, or Firefox. Game emulators are banned. Programming environments like Logo are banned. Porn is (mostly) banned. Some of this might change, but my gut tells me that there’s whole categories of application that simply won’t happen on the iPad. It’s still an open question as to whether or not that’s a big loss.

7. iPhone apps on the iPad suck. Badly.
There’s two ways to run iPhone/iPod apps on the iPad: You can run them as a tiny iPhone sized box in the middle of the screen, or you blow them up to double-size where everything looks blurry and pixelated. So, your options are either eyestrain or headaches.

You might think to yourself, “they can’t be THAT bad”. Trust me. They are.

There’s rumors that the next generation iPhone will have double the resolution, which would help solve this problem. In the meantime, you’re pretty much confined to dedicated iPad apps.

Other stuff, and a conclusion
From my understanding, there’s also some godawful usability problems with file syncing and notifications. However, I didn’t really get a chance to explore that end of things. If I get a chance to spend a few days with one, I’ll do another writeup.

So, here’s my initial conclusion: All in all, the iPad is a toy. It’s great fun, and it provides a glimpse into our possible future. However, it’s not a particularly good work machine, and it doesn’t come close to replacing a laptop. There’s simply too much missing functionality at this point.

I can see a lot of the iPad’s defects and omissions being solved over time, and it’s quite likely that this will happen reasonably soon. Apple is obviously putting all of its resources behind these kinds of devices, and it feels like they want this to eventually replace the PC. However, at the moment, I can only recommend the iPad if you’ve already got a good computer setup.

However, if you’re a gadget geek with $500 to blow, you could do a lot worse.

:iPad

iPad review from my brother-in-law. Very nice writeup that explores the good, the bad, and the ugly of the new wonder device.