iPad after a week
I have owned an iPad now for a week (16 GB, WiFi only), so I thought it was time to give a little report. Everything you have read is true, both the good and the bad. It is a large iPod Touch, but with several spectacular differences: the screen is very bright and with such high resolution that it seems larger than it is. It is much clearer than my HP Netbook. The other obvious difference is the virtual keyboard. I am touch typing this post on it while seated at a table with the iPad in its Apple case propped at a slight incline. I have rather thin fingers, and I am quite a good touch typist, but it hasn’t taken me long to get used to the keyboard. (One complaint–the apostrophe is on the symbols page of the keyboard, so it makes typing contractions a pain.) In reality the virtual keyboard is not much smaller than that of many netbooks that i have tried. There is a built in dictionary that offers to complete some words as you type, but i can’t figure out how the words are chosen, because some of the offerings are really off the wall, but some very common words do not show up. I am planning to take only the iPad with me to a business conference this week, so that will be a good test. No, it doesn’t play Flash video. My online life has not come to a halt. Yours probably won’t either.
The battery life is unusually long for a portable device such as this. I have easily gotten as much as ten hours of active use (e.g. Playing music while reading an ebook, then watching a Netflix streaming movie.)
The apps that have been ramped up to be “universal” for both the iPad and iPhone, iTouch are great on large screen. The WordPress client that I am using at the moment is spacious and easy to navigate. Apple Pages is quite full-featured and could be used to write fairly lengthy documents.
Two apps sold me on getting the iPad: the Kindle book reader app and the Netflix app. I have read many books on the iPhone Kindle app with satisfaction. It is quite an immersive experience, superior to the Kindle device itself. The iPad version wipes the Kindle off the map. In it’s current incarnation, I don’t know why anyone would choose the Kindle over the iPad as an ebook reading device.
The Netflix app is truly amazing. If you are a Netflix subscriber, you can stream movies from your “play now” queue directly to your iPad. I was doubtful, but it Just Works. No more being tied to a laptop or your TV. ABC has a similar app for streaming selected episodes of ABC shows, but it is not as sophisticated.
I am not a gamer, so I cannot report on the device as a gaming machine. There do seem to be a fair number of famed in the App Store.
All the usual iPhone buIlt-in apps have been rethought with gorgeous new user interfaces (mail, contacts, calendar, iPod) Syncing is through iTunes. The non-iPad iPhone apps all still work oxo, either at their native iPhone screen size or magnified two times. They can be a bit pixellated, but are still perfectly usable. Apps are being updated every day. I have had at least one app update per day for the past week.
I think we are seeing only the infancy of the iPad’s potential. We will see an explosion of new apps and new KINDS of apps in the next few months. I think the iPad has the potential to be a great educational tool, with the development of “learning apps” that could be assembled in various ways.
The rule of thumb is to never by generation 1 of a new device, but I think that the first generation iPad offers enough new and intriguing features and inspired rethinking of existing apps that I can recommend it. If you need a laptop, get a laptop, but for the majority of day to day use, and above all for consuming digital content, the iPad is in a class apart at the moment.
Happy birthday, Steve
Today is Steve Jobs’s 51st birthday. People who know me know that I am a big fan of Apple Computer products. (my first Mac was the 128K original model in 1984, and I’ve had one of most models in between–even some of the dogs in the late ’80s. I currently personally use most often a 12″ G4 powerbook, and I have 3 various iPods in rotation.) But yesterday Apple announced a milestone that may eclipse all of Steve Jobs’s accomplishments to date: the sale of the billionth legally downloaded song from the iTunes store. (The winner of the billionth song will receive a 20″ iMac, 10 iPods, a $10,000 iTunes store gift card, and–with a kind of Donald-Trump-ish “class”–a scholarship will be established in honor of the event at the Juilliard School in New York.)
Apple is the company who accomplished what many said could not be done–getting people to pay willingly for songs to download them legally. The simplicity of the $.99 per song scheme and the relatively liberal rights for consumers to use the songs on multiple computers and burn them to CDs has been part of the success. It is, of course, all a ploy to get people to buy iPods, since the per-song profit margin to Apple for downloads is miniscule. But Apple’s success in the market does also set the bar high for potential competitors (Amazon.com being the latest to announce their entry into the market.) A billion songs is a lot of content for people to abandon to move to a different–and incompatible–format. One might hope that Apple would open its digital rights management software to other players in the market. Amazon’s scheme of making digital downloads available immediately for CDs that you buy online in intriguing. This week alone I have purchased three CDs and immediately converted them to play on my iPod or my digital music server at home, bypassing the CD player entirely. (To be honest, I don’t remember the last time I actually played a CD–I prefer being able to put together diverse song lists with my Squeezebox device at home.) As someone who is mostly interested in classical music (although I am also known to download trashy dance music as well), I don’t usually download “by the song”, but still more by complete albums. (Since symphonies and operas are multi-movement works, in most cases, it’s cheaper to buy the whole thing than to just download a few segments.) The availability of downloadable music has not diminished my purchasing of CDs–sometimes I just want the liner notes, which I can’t get with online downloads.
The landscape continues to change rapidly, and undoubtedly Apple’s dominance will be challenged. Others want a piece of the action. But if Steve Jobs’s previous actions warrant any prediction of the future, he has more plans up his sleeve to keep things interesting–and to keep my buying Apple computers.
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