For my 30th birthday, about a month ago, my wife got me a Kindle. I’ve been eyeing that device since it launched, and wondering if it was worth buying. I read a decent amount, but not a ton, in normal years, though this year I’ve probably read more than in the two or three previous.
So I never really got a Kindle myself. I figured I’d like it, but not love it, so I’d wait until I maybe got one for a gift, or the price of a future generation dropped so low that it seemed inconsequential. Since the two major players in the digital reader space are Amazon and Barnes and Noble, both of whom are more interested in selling the books than the hardware, I suspect that the prices on them will keep dropping until one day they’re free if you purchase some number of books. Verizon will give you a phone for free so they can sell you the service for it, and I think Amazon will eventually do the same. They’re already rumored to be selling them below cost, and selling large numbers of books to their owners, and the price of e-ink screens will keep dropping from here.
Anyway, what I really didn’t expect was just how much I would love the device. It really is to books what mp3 players are to music. In fact it’s perhaps more than that. The ability to find new stuff to read without going to a book store, to always pick up right where you left off, the ability to store dozens of books online and not need a bookshelf, the ability to read blogs, magazines, and even web pages (with a little effort) without staring at a monitor, it adds up to more than just playback.
So it’s safe to say it’s my new favorite device. I don’t think I’ve used it for less than an hour in any day since I got it.
At work we also got a slew of iPads a few days after I got the Kindle. We bought them for making our first iOS application, Hearts HD, for it. I’ve been taking them home on the weekends. Overall I’d say it’s a little nicer than I expected it to be, but not much.
The main thing I’d overlooked in my initial impression is how good it is for gaming. This, along with frustration at Facebook’s platform changes, is why we’re testing the waters of the platform. The iPod Touch and iPhone are pretty decent for gaming, but the extra screen space of the iPad really lets you make gaming more immersive. Games like Plants vs. Zombies, Angry Birds HD, Ten Pin Shuffle, etc. feel as if they were made for exactly this sort of device. I even gave it to an elderly lady I know (who has rarely used computers in her life) and she was able to get the hang a Mahjong app I found.
When not gaming, though, you feel the device’s limitations quite frequently. The email app is pretty nice and works very well with my Exchange Server account. But typing on it sucks so badly that I hesitate to write anything more than a cursory reply with it. The device is heavy and awkward if you try to hold it up in portrait mode and thumb-type on it Blackberry-style, and it’s still much too small to set on your laptop and type like you would on a normal keyboard. You bump the wrong key a lot and the autocorrect often seems as annoying as it is helpful.
The screen is by far the smudgiest thing I’ve ever seen. That’s been fixed by putting an Invisible Shield screen protector on it (and it’s now nearly bullet-proof) but the protector just doesn’t feel as nice as glass. Still, it’s a win since you don’t have to Windex it every 20 minutes or deal with blurry words when reading.
You really feel the lack of Flash frequently, more so than I do on my phone. Recently I took it on a trip with me and discovered just how annoying it was to be unable to view something as simple as a restaurant’s website. Granted, there’s no reason whatsoever for a restaurant websites to be entirely Flash-based, but all of the good restaurants sites’ are, and you just can’t view them on the iPad. It seems to me that you design for the world as it is, not as it should be, and the internet portion of the world runs on Flash these days.
Video is just so pervasive on the internet now, and even though much of it is on YouTube (which works pretty well on the iPad) much of it is on other services that don’t. You don’t realize how much, I suppose, until you use the thing for awhile. Perhaps HTML 5 will change this eventually, but for now it’s extremely annoying.
The device has many good points. For one, it’s highly responsive. The processor feels like a clear upgrade over all but the newest smart phones. Browsing the web is much nicer than on a phone because you do a lot less pinching and tapping to zoom, so that’s great. The battery life is excellent, though I wish it would charge off of a computer in under a day. It apparently just needs more power than a USB port can give to get to full charge quickly, but if you plug it into the wall it fills up fast enough.
The App Store is, of course, the App Store. Running iPhone apps sucks, but there are lots of good native iPad apps and more coming out all the time. Especially games.
Unfortunately you have to tether it and use iTunes on your computer a decent amount, which has gotten better on Windows since I used it last but still sucks. I don’t ever have to plug my laptop into my desktop, and I don’t much care for having to do it to sync the iPad either.
I’ll leave out most discussion about iOS because by now you probably know whether you love it or hate it. My personal opinion is that it’s good but not great, being held back mainly by one thing: the inability to multitask. That is extremely frustrating and bugs me every single time I use it. The notifications system is clunky at best when you’re used to WebOS, but I don’t want obtrusive notifications on a full-sized device, I want a task bar. I don’t even want the pseudo multitasking we’re getting soon (though I suppose that can’t hurt) I want the genuine ability to flip between programs, and battery life be damned. We’re all used to plugging in our smart phones every time we’re in one place for more than 10 minutes by now, and no amount multitasking is going to get the iPad’s relatively enormous battery down to less than that.
So overall I suppose I’d say the device is ok, but just doesn’t feel like it fills a purpose. It isn’t replacing your laptop, and it isn’t replacing your phone. The virtual keyboard blows, worse than virtual keyboards on phones due to the size and weight, and you could connect a regular keyboard via Bluetooth but then all you have is a really crappy laptop that isn’t even cheap. I won’t be buying a WebOS or Android tablet either for pretty much the same reasons.
When I use the Kindle, I constantly feel what I can do with it. When I use the iPad, I constantly feel what I can’t. The expectations for this sort of device are so much higher than with a modern smart phone (given the increased size and expense) but the experience is about the same, and in some ways worse.
