iPad First Impressions

Ok, I've had an iPad for just over two weeks now, so I guess it's time for some first impressions.

Let's start at the very beginning.  The very first thought than ran through my mind when I pulled the thing out of the box was "oh, that's heavy!"  I'd seen the keynote video of Steve Jobs flipping flipping his iPad around like it's a feather.  He either practiced that, or they made a special lightweight version for him to play with.  It's not like it's super heavy, but a little to heavy for comfortable reading while standing up on the train.  I suppose that half of the weight is battery though.  And I'm not sure I'd sacrifice the amazing battery life for a lighter device.

But on to more substantive concerns...  The iPad is basically a big iPod Touch right?  How come the iPod Touch comes with so many built-in apps that were just plain left out of the iPad?

Apps that come with iPod Touch but not iPad:

• Stocks
• Weather
• Voice Memos
• Clock
• Calculator
• Uno (just kidding, I bought that one.  Cool game though)

So what gives?  I'd gotten used to these as staples of iPhone OS.  I'm used to seeing them on my iPod Touch and iPhone.  Why did Apple leave them out of iPad?  I suppose you could argue that with a fuller web browsing experience, you don't really need these apps, or that they spent all their time working on the new YouTube app and didn't have time to re-vamp these once.



But I suspect something more sinister.  I suspect that Apple would rather have us route around in the App Store and try on a dozen different stocks and weather apps for $2.99 a pop than to provide a more complete experience out of the box.  I guess time will tell.  It will be interesting to see if any of these are brought back in future OS updates.

Onto the device itself.  It is, in a word, beautiful.  Images look incredible on the clear, bright screen.  And the hardware screen rotation lock switch is a welcome addition.  An annoying problem with iPod Touch / iPhone is that the screen rotates on you when you don't want it to (like when laying on your side in bed and trying to read an email).

The large on-screen keyboard takes a little getting used to.  At first I couldn't type on it to save my life.  I think the problem was partly psychological.  But also, there's no where to rest your hands if you try to type while holding the thing on your lap.  After a couple weeks I'm going a little better.  Still not keyboard speed, but enough to get some basic stuff done.

The built-in mic works well.  I made a Skype test call with the device just resting on my lap.  I spoke in a normal voice and when the recording was played back it sounded perfect.  (OK, it sounded like a perfect recording my my voice.)

As with many users, I've experience WiFi connection problems.  It only happens on a WEP network though. On WPA or WPA2 networks the thing works fine.  This leads me to believe that this is a software issue, not a problem with the hardware.  As such it will probably be fixed in a future update.  And if you're serious about security you should avoid using WEP anyway.

Most of the built-in apps are a big improvement over their iPhone siblings.  The iPod app itself is quite nice and the ability to create / edit playlists other than the "on the go" playlist is a welcome addition.  The YouTube and iTunes apps are also fairly well done.  The App Store is probably the worst implementation of the built-in apps.  You can't really do anything in there except search and flip through "top ten" style listings.  I feel like I'm being herded towards the apps that Apple wants me to buy.  Hopefully this will get better in a future release.

And how about the 3rd party apps?  It's still early and there's not quite the selection in the app store that one might hope for.  But that will change in time.  In fact the selection is getting better almost daily. There are still enough decent apps to get you started.  Here are my top 5 picks so far:

• SmugMug - nice interface for browsing SmugMug albums.  There's a slideshow feature, and you can cache albums for offline viewing.  Nice
• Photo Pad - simple app that syncs your Flickr stream, including sets and tags, for offline viewing.  The interface is a little clunky, and at the time of this writing there is no slideshow or pinch-to-zoom support, but caring my Flickr stream around with me is still very cool.
• LightTrac - shows the sun angle at a given location on a specified date and time.  Very cool.  I've already blogged about this one, read more here.
• FlickStackr - really ugly icon, really great way to browser Flickr.  Better then the website actually.  Allows you to "stack" photos for offline viewing and gives almost full functionality.  You can fave, comment, and view EXIF data.
• SonataNote - sheet music for iPad!  Comes with several classical selections.  I suspect a future update will allow in-app purchase for more music.  It also plays the music.

In summary, I'm happy with my iPad.  As a photographer it's great to have a portable electronic portfolio that does my images justice, and there's enough techie stuff to keep the geek in me happy too.  As with all Apple releases there are weird things missing, and a few things that are not up to scratch.  But these kinds of things usually get better with time.