The iPad is not a big smartphone nor a scaled down laptop. It's not really like any tablet that's come before it. And for this reason, it will delight users ready for something new, and confuse and upset people who expect it to be something old and familiar.
In with the New
If you buy an iPad, there's very little that you have to learn, and almost nothing you'll need to consult any sort of manual for.
Everything is minimalist and uncluttered, with tools appearing only when they make sense. Most things that you'd usually do with a mouse and an Inspector panel are now performed by hands-on finger work.
Touch a graphic object in a word processor and you can rotate, crop or mask it with your fingers using intuitive controls. Paint with your fingers but see results that look like a pencil or airbrush or wide tipped marker. Flick through videos as if they are pages in a magazine.
Apple's Pages word processor on iPad (which I used to enter all the text for this review) will probably look familiar to desktop iWork users (pictured opposite of each other, below), but it certainly doesn't demand any experience with the Pages 09 app in order to begin using it.
Out with the Old
At the same time, there's an awful lot of stuff you'll need to forget. You may initially find yourself feeling lost on occasion, looking for an unnecessary convention from the 1980s to allow you to get back to where you were. At least, that is, until you realize that you can escape from pretty much anything by simply touching another part of the screen.
There are rarely any close buttons anywhere in the interface. Apple invented the close box for the Macintosh as a way to dismiss windows, and in the 30 years since they've become big and red and menacing and appear everywhere. But not on the iPad.
There's no quit. When you're done with an app, you just return to the Home screen by touching the Home button. The app quits itself, immediately. It doesn't cycle through all of your open documents asking to save them, it just quits.
And there's rarely any save commands. Apps that work with documents save them automatically as you work, typically using a version control system that allows you to undo all of your changes step by step, even after you quit the app and then reopen the file again.
There's no exposed file system nor file permissions nor open file dialogs nor anything like the Finder for exploring the iPhone OS' internal file system. There's also no sense of managing which app opens which file, because apps only open their own files.
All of these things are missing because Apple has decided that the way things are in computing is often not necessary or desirable, but merely an accepted convention that is often confusing and complicating in a way that adds very little value to most users, but saddles them with a level of complexity they needn't bear.
This review will present an overview of iPad as Apple's vision of the future of computing, which rejects the notion that "computing" should force people to wrestle with lots of low level complexity, and which instead seeks to harness powerful technologies to make performing complex things easy for end users.
Whether this vision will be well received and commercially successful is yet to be seen, but iPad is certainly set up with the perfect circumstances: it has achieved massive visibility, it is familiar to an installed base of 70 million iPhone OS users, it hits reasonable price targets, and it has a lot of big name developers adding value to it via the more than 3,500 new, iPad-specific titles in the iTunes App Store.
iPad hardware: the body
The hardware form factor of iPad is quintessentially Apple, with minimal lines, few exposed buttons and switches, and like iPhone, no ports other than the standard Dock Connector.
While it's commonly described as a "big iPod touch," iPad really looks a lot more like the top half of a small MacBook. It uses the same bright LCD screen as the new MacBook Pros, with "IPS" display technology for delivering accurate color and extremely wide viewing angles. It also sports the same glossy black wide margin around the display.
There are only four physical controls: the Home and Power buttons, a volume rocker control, and a switch to lock the orientation of the screen to prevent it from shifting as you tilt it. This welcome addition will hopefully make it to the existing iPhone and iPod touch as well, if only in software.
There's a headphone jack that supports the iPhone/MacBook integrated mic and remote control features (although no headphones are included in the box), as well as a built in mic and a decent quality (but mono) speaker grill that plays audio fully sufficient for enjoying a handheld movie or video game.
Its weight (1.5 lbs, 0.68 kg) and density makes it feel substantial, although it can hardly be described as heavy given the fleet of Tablet PCs that came before it (and are promised to come after it), which are all much bulkier and often significantly heavier in the 2-3 lbs range.
The back shell uses the same aluminum unibody construction Apple pioneered with the MacBook Air. This gives the device a strong, very rigid, and high quality feel.
Unlike the iPhone, which can warm up quickly while making a 3G call, or a MacBook running at full speed that can threaten to bake your legs, I've never felt any suggestion of warmth from the back(or the front) of the new iPad. This thing runs cooler than a cucumber.
For a 1.0 product, iPad offers simply phenomenal construction, feel, and design. Of course, that's because nothing about it is really 1.0, but rather a series of refinements to Apple's existing products, from the iPhone OS to its MacBook construction.
iPad hardware: the battery
Thanks to the relatively large amount of space behind its large screen, iPad packs a big battery pack with 5.5 times the capacity of the iPhone. And despite its large and bright display, the device sips power very efficiently.
While desktop operating systems have incorporated a variety of power management technologies to enable them to work on notebooks, Apple's iPhone OS was built from the start to coast on as little energy as possible. That provides iPad with a much stronger starting position in efficiency than netbooks running Windows XP/Vista/7.
Like everything else that Apple builds these days, iPad has no user-replaceable battery. But there are lots of external battery packs and charging devices designed to work with the huge installed base of devices with iPod connectors, and many of these should work with iPad, too.
The device does demand more power to charge (and charge quickly) than the iPhone does, which is why it ships with a larger, 10 Watt adapter. It may also report that it is "Not Charging" when plugged into the USB ports on a Mac or PC.
This message, which of course can only be seen when the screen is on, means the device is using enough power to illuminate its display that there's not enough extra to recharge the battery. If you switch the screen off, it can trickle charge from USB if the port supports the "High Power" specification, which delivers 5 Watts. It will always charge fastest when plugged into its own charger.
As a variety of reviewers have noted, the device will coast along for 11-12 hours while playing movies, even without dimming the screen from its rather bright default setting.
iPad hardware: keyboards
Compared to the existing iPhone and iPod touch, iPad and its iPhone 3.2 firmware presents a virtual keyboard that's significantly easier to use, although it still isn't going to please touch typists.
It's better primarily because the keys are larger and easier to hit, but they're still virtual so you have to watch the keyboard as you type. It's okay for entering a paragraph or so, but you won't want to type in long documents by touching out letters on the screen. However, after some iPad typing, returning to iPhone text entry feels extremely cramped.
In portrait mode, the virtual keyboard of the iPad takes up much less of the screen in comparison to the iPhone, but in landscape orientation, it consumes nearly the same ratio (as shown below).
To demonstrate the versatility of the virtual keyboard, iPad apps can now present custom keyboards that are suited for a specific task, such as those used in Apple's own Numbers spreadsheet, which adjust depending on whether the current cell is a formula, a date, text, or a number.
Apple has also extended the iPhone OS' copy and paste system of text selection to add new functions you might want to do while entering text, such as looking up a word's definition in the dictionary (a feature supported in specific apps such as Apple's Pages word processor), or replacing the word with a related one from the system dictionary.
With spell checking turned on, words that are flagged as misspelled are underlined in red, and touching the word presents a popup of spelling suggestions (shown below). The existing auto spell correction of the iPhone OS still works, too
The biggest new thing for iPad in the keyboards department is that you can now connect any Bluetooth keyboard or the special Dock Connector keyboard Apple sells, which is integrated into a Dock stand.
Being able to type with a conventional keyboard makes iPad a serious replacement for having to lug along a full sized notebook just to do some writing while commuting on a train or flying across the country.
In addition to being able to touch type with your eyes focused on the screen, an external keyboard can also set screen brightness, volume, control media playback, and perform text selections (using shift plus the arrow keys; you can also use shift+Option+arrow keys to select one word at a time, or use shift+Command+arrow keys).
An external keyboard is also great because you can invoke a variety of handy keyboard shortcuts, including Command+X/C/V to cut/copy/paste without using your fingers, or use Command+Z or Command+shift+Z to Undo/Redo operations. Not all familiar operations have a keyboard equivalent though; Pages doesn't currently support key combinations for setting bold or italics, for example, although this is only a limitation of the app itself.
If you make a text selection from the keyboard, you (somewhat confusingly) can't always touch the screen to select an operation like copy; touching the screen often resets your selection. In other words, you'll need to select and perform operations from the keyboard, or from the screen using touch but you can't always mix back and forth.
This appears to be a bug, as in some apps (like Mail, but not Pages), when you "select all" using Command+A, it will pop up a Cut/Copy/Paste button you can touch, but in most apps, when you make a partial selection using arrow keys and shift, it won't allow you to touch the selection to pop up options; instead, it will reset the selection.
Once you associate a Bluetooth keyboard, iPad apps no longer automatically show the virtual keyboard. To go back to normal operation, you have to power your external keyboard off. However, you can display the virtual keyboard when using an external keyboard by hitting a function key (the pre-iPad Apple Bluetooth keyboard will do this when you hit the eject button; Apple's iPad keyboards have a specially marked button for displaying or dismissing the virtual keypad.)
Apple's iPad-specific keyboard also includes buttons for the Home screen, screen lock, and initiating Spotlight search and its Picture Frame mode. I couldn't figure out how to trigger any of those special features from a standard Bluetooth keyboard using any combination of keys.
If I haven't stressed it enough yet, being able to both type and perform copy/paste and undo features from an external keyboard open up iPad to an entirely new class of uses over the previous iPhone OS devices.
It's great to know Apple only reserved this trick for iPad just to show it off, and will deliver it on its other mobile devices as well in iPhone 4.0, once the exclusive novelty period wears off.
source:appleinsider continued
