taking fire

Early in the year I have a bit of post-bonus disposable income, so I indulged in some wallet bukkake and ordered an iPad. Here is what happened.

First impressions

I’ve used an iPhone for a couple of years now, so that gives you a certain perspective. The icons and such look very familiar. The first thing that hits you is: holy shit there is just a ridiculous amount of screen space. In reality it’s a modest 1024 by 768, but after using a phone it’s pretty striking. I think how you react to this device depends on what you compare it to: is it a big phone, or a small computer?

Although you have this expanse of screen, the icons and buttons are still iPhone-sized. They feel dwarfed, relatively speaking; you have to aim carefully with your fingers.

Typing

This is critical for me: the killer iPad use for me is lounging about on the sofa typing shit up.

At first typing is definitely weird. The reason: no tactile feedback. It is not possible to touch-type on a glass screen. This means you have to look at the keyboard most of the time, which is unnatural; the letters are appearing somewhere up there in hopefully the correct order.

After some time you get used to it, eyes flicking back and forth. I completely rely on landscape mode though (bigger keys to hit). The little keyboard clicks are indispensable.

Last bit of weirdness: an iPad forces you to cut your fingernails really short! Long-nailed typists just receive a series of clacky noises and nothing happens.

The good stuff

Things with big sweepy gestures are lovely. Google Maps is a whole new experience; it genuinely feels futuristic. You are holding a high-res atlas that comes to life in your hands; looking down, you sweep the world below you around, grinning like a retarded god.

The feel of the iBook is great. There’s a wee gimmick where you can grab the page and wave it around instead of just reading the fucking thing. The popup dictionary is beautifully styled and charming.

Random stuff:

• IMDB is outstanding, very polished.
• Frotz uses all the space! Lovely.
• Evernote have made a decent effort but there’s no A-Z index of your notebooks.
• Netflix is magical: all your Instant Play films appear on the device, just like that.
• Wikipanion is good for WPing.
• Epicurious is great, swipe-able food and cocktail recipes.
• There are few ‘native’ Twitter apps yet (just Twitterific so far). The best Facebook interface is just using the website in Safari.
• Oddly enough, games that use virtual joysticks play much better! Critical Wave, Mini Squadron.

The baws

So first up, you want to install stuff. Unfortunately, AppStore is slow as balls. Navigation is worse than the iPhone version; you can’t just look at free stuff, for example. You have to drag down two columns, slowly loading ten items at a time, going slowly cross-eyed. If you choose to install something, back to the start you go! Awful.

The iPad does run your existing iPhone apps, but by default they appear in a highly comical phone-sized window. You have the option to scale up the display by two, brute force. There is pixelation.

If you already have a lot of iPhone apps, prepare to be disappointed. Apps fall into these categories:

1. Already updated to support iPad. Give that developer a banana! You install it, it works on the new screen size. Beautiful. Only a few developers are this responsible.
2. Never going to be updated. If you want to run this, it’s going to look shit forever. For some apps this doesn’t really matter. Example: Guitar Toolkit is still great at tuning guitars.
3. There’s an updated version, but they’ll make you pay for it. Even though you already bought it for iPhone. Also, for the privilege of running a tweaked iPad version, you are given the opportunity to pay TWICE AS MUCH. Pay again for Civilisation? At double the price? To get a buggy version that crashes? FUCK YOU, Firaxis games. FUCK. YOU.

Typing badness: for people who care about stupid things like punctuation, the keyboard is shit. Apple evidently assumed nobody really needs apostrophes and hid them on the secondary keyboard. You end up relying on the spellcheck to insert the symbols into words like can’t and you’re, which it will do some of the time but not always. Maddening.

Not much joy for Google Reader users; no dedicated interface. You can bring up the ‘desktop’ version (using the wee link at screen bottom) but it’s rubbish.

Oh look there’s no silence button! I hope you remembered to turn the sound down before going to bed! You have to set your Notification and Sound options carefully to avoid midnight pings and bleeps.

Lastly and damningly, Safari is shite. That is: the only available iPad browser in a web-centric world, is shite. Expectations of productivity are high, but in practice you spend way too much time awkwardly switching between email and browser. Hopefully the new OS 4 should help here.

The worst part is that tabbed browsing is a cruel joke:

1. There’s no background loading. ‘Open in new page’ means waiting two seconds for the fancy animations to play out, then having a nice white blankness thrust into your puss until the new stuff is loaded. ‘New tab’ really means, ‘load this bit for me to read later, but don’t fuck with my flow.’ This is the exact opposite. Terrible.
2. Inactive tabs are not kept in memory. When you switch to a previously loaded tab, it forces a reload from scratch. Even though you loaded it completely a few seconds ago. Awful. Clearly the iPad developers do not spend time surfing dirty pictures on 4chan.

And finally

If you ever considered buying (or actually bought) a netbook, the iPad fills that niche pretty well. Typing is not perfect, but definitely good enough.

Should you get one? Well, it’s early days and there are few killer apps (or indeed, many apps at all). I wouldn’t feel stupid for holding off for a month or six, to let the marketplace fill out. But if like me you’re always on the interbing and are keen to spend less time perched before your desktop, go for it.