MattMaroon.com

I went to Best Buy Saturday and got to play around with the iPad a little bit. My initial impression was that it’s pretty much exactly what it looked like: a big-ass iPod Touch.

There are a few immediately obvious ramifications of the much larger size. For one, web browsing is much less unpleasant. On a phone-sized screen there’s all this pinching and zooming, and slow loading even on Wi-Fi. It’s painful. The iPad is large enough that it’s substantially better.

It also feels much faster. I don’t know what’s under the hood, but you get the feeling that the larger form factor allowed for a better processor, probably because it could fit a much larger battery. It’s pretty responsive.

The larger size changes the keyboard as well. It’s kind of awkward really because the device is too large to allow for thumb typing, Blackberry style, like you would on the iPhone, but even in landscape mode it’s much too small to just sit down on a table and type on like a normal keyboard. I think on the whole it might actually be worse than typing on a phone-sized screen just because it feels like it should be better and isn’t. I hate virtual keypads though, so if you’re one of those nut jobs who claims to like typing on an iPhone as much as a normal keyboard, your mileage might vary.

If you’re not a total fanboy, you might not care for it too much, but probably won’t hate it simply because you won’t be doing too much typing. The device is not going to replace your laptop. The lack of multitasking ensures that. Using a Palm Pre has me spoiled, and I kept clicking the center button to switch from one task to another only to find it close what I was using. I guess if I were an iPhone user I wouldn’t have that problem, but I still wouldn’t be leaving my Lenovo at home on a trip. The iPad might be used in its place on the plane though.

Reading on it is much like reading on a computer monitor, and a good one. Great for short periods, but I don’t think I’d want to read a novel on it but for just a little web surfing or news browsing it’s fantastic. So if you’re using a Kindle, I don’t think the iPad’s going to replace it, anymore than your iPod replaced your vinyl collection. It’s just a different style of device.

It lacks Flash, which is unfortunate because the screen is large enough that casual games might be great on it. I tried watching Hulu on it and couldn’t, which made me frown, but there’s a YouTube app so if Avril Lavigne videos are your thing, you’re set. In fact this might be the ultimate kittens-on-treadmills viewing device.

The guy at Best Buy said they had gotten in 25 of each model. The cheapest one (16 GB) sold out but the others were still in stock. I suspect the vast majority of the demand will be at the lowest price point, and that’s understandable. Overall the iPad seems like a cool toy but not much more. And, not $500 cool.

If it were $200 I could see it having a place in the living room. I don’t think I’d ever bother taking it anywhere (expect maybe a plane, which it seems almost designed for) because it’s not much better than a phone for casual browsing on the go. But for Googling to find out what happened in the previous episode of Lost while you’re watching the current one and eating cheese straight from the can in your recliner, you really can’t beat a big-ass iPod Touch.

This entry was posted on April 4, 2010 at 5:10 am and is filed under Uncategorized . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed Both comments and pings are currently closed.