If you haven’t heard of the iPad, I’d like to know where you’ve been the last few months, then go there on vacation. It’s the most incindiary prodcut release Apple’s had since the original iPhone back in 2007, a tablet shaped device that promises to become your movie theaterest, book readerest, web browserest game playingest device of all time. It has been described using words like ‘magical’ by Apple’s mercurial CEO Steve Jobs. If there ever was a device that made it less possible to write an honest and unbiased review of it without sounding like either a fanboy apologizer or a hopeless cynic, I don’t know what it is. But I’m going to try and hopefully you’ll agree, disagree, laugh cry and die. Maybe not the last bit. If you’re still with me then read on for my review of the iPad.

I’m sure that if you’re reading my review you’ve most likely read other reviews out there on the interwebs, so I’m not going to bother going down a list of specs and features. If you want a lame debate about whether the iPad is a ‘netbook killer’ or ‘laptop replacement’ or ‘useless piece of kit’ you have countless other sites to get that information spoonfed to you as if the reviewers knew you and your tastes intimately. Instead I’m going to just talk to you for a bit about the various ways I’ve used the iPad so far , lay out some of my observations and leave you to try to suss out whether or not the iPad works on any of those levels for you personally.

Constructionation

“Tell her you want her to donate her body to science and you’re science.”

It’s beautiful. I mean really and truly well designed and incredibly well manufactured. When you pick it up and hold it in your hands, it doesn’t feel like a piece of commercial electronics, it feels like an industrial implement of some sort. If you’ve ever held a really high quality piece of portable lab equipment or a high-end camera lens, you’ll know what I mean. It feels like it has purpose.

The rear surface is always cold to the touch when you pick it up initially but because it’s a thin piece of milled aluminum, it quickly gets warmed by contact with your skin. The touchscreen is a piece of glass that’s thick enough to have zero flex no matter how hard you tap or press it. At 1.5 pounds and as thin at the edge as a healthy slice of cheese, it has enough heft that you could probably fend off an attacker with it if you had to. I never had to tile the iPad to show anyone a video and was able, partly due to the size and partly due to the immense viewing angle of the IPS screen, to show an entire table a YouTube video without trouble.

It’s slightly too heavy to comfortably hold up with one hand, no matter what you see in the commercials or guided tours that Apple has put out, you’ll spend a lot of time with it resting in one hand while operating it with the other or propped up on your lap or a pillow. I’ve had some awkward moments when sitting in different positions. Upright during a discourse, on the couch watching a movie, in my office chair, in bed. Each one required just a little bit different tablet-fu to get the positioning just right.

It only has two external controls besides the home button. An orientation lock which actually doesn’t seem to be universal, some apps still choose to ignore it, and a volume switch. No mute, although there is a way to fix that by holding down the ‘volume down’ button for 2 seconds.

Otherwise you’ve got a headphone jack questionably placed at the top of the device instead of the bottom like an iPod touch, a mic next to it, a single speaker placed where you rest it on your leg or against your body while holding it vertical and Apple’s standard 30 pin dock connector. I’m personally not all that offended by the dock connector, but the placement of the headphone jack and speaker are annoying. The headphone jack makes you string the headphones down the back of the device or across the front of it at all times. This is silly and a fairly surprising lapse considering the obvious thought that went into the rest of the device. As a consolation however, you can rotate almost all of the iPad apps I’ve seen 180 degrees so that you can literally switch your headphone jack to the bottom by simply rotating the iPad. The speaker is on the right while watching movies which I guess is the point, but why couldn’t they just add one more speaker? I’ve seen the inside of this thing and theres plenty of room.

However, I’ve purchased and operated more pieces of consumer electronics than I care to think about and after all is said and done, it still feels like it should cost closer to a grand, not $500 at all (for the base model).

Performance

‘I eat green berets for breakfast. and right now, I’m very hungry.’

Quick, fast, smooth, liquid, these are all words that I would use as adjectives to describe how using the iPad feels. It’s homegrown Apple A4 processor does a great job of making the iPad feel seamless to use. If you tap on an app, there is no turning away while it loads to turn back and see what it’s up to. It scrolls even beefy documents easily and loads content-heavy webpages faster than any mobile browser I’ve seen not on a laptop. It pushes 720p HD video with ease and never stuttered music playback even while pushing a lot of polygons around. The only noticable slowdown in a game I’ve seen is Plants vs. Zombies when you finish a level there’s a full screen transparency effect that seems to give it some trouble, but it could just be game coding.

The home button has been slightly redesigned on the iPad as well, giving it a shorter throw and more clicky feel, which I love. I always felt that the home button felt too mushy on the iPhone.

The speaker strikes me as just about adequate, although another speaker, perhaps even three more would strike me as a better arrangement. Then you could have two speakers active on any given rotation. At full volume the sound from that YouTube video was just about able to reach across a dinner table. I’d recommend headphones for any serious movie or TV viewing.

The screen is viciously bright at the higher settings and frankly doesn’t get dim enough at the lowest settings for me to look at anything with a white background in the dark comfortably. I think it’s the first time that I’ve complained about a screen being too bright for my tastes. I would estimate that there will be some Jailbreak hacks that will allow a lower level of screen brightness. I found that my photographs and images frankly look the best that I’ve ever seen them on the iPad, sharp, bright and accurate. The iPad as a presentation tool for my photography business is something that I will definitely explore.

The addition of the screen rotation lock is welcome, but unfortunately I found myself toggling it on and off a bit too much as a lot of the iPad apps out there are currently too haphazard in the way that they handle the orientation standards. Once the apps out there get a bit more consistent it should be easier to leave it in one position or another but still it can be useful for reading a book or watching a video while laying on your side in bed.

The handling of iPhone apps is an unfortunate but necessary evil. If you load the iPad up with an iPhone app it will usually run it just fine, but in a small rectangle in the middle of the screen, pretty much exactly the size of an iPhone’s screen. Then you can choose to double the size of the app on the screen by tapping a “2x” button in the bottom right corner of the screen. Then the app displays twice as large, but incredibly crappy looking. The only exceptions that I’ve found to this rule so far is that apps that display a remote screen, like VNC or WinAdmin, display the full resolution of the computer that they’re connecting to and apps that play video are given a bit of a pass because video upscales pretty well on it’s own.

Softwares

Wow! Burn’s wetware matches her software!

Let’s start with the obvious, we have no idea what software on the iPad will actually be capable of. Most of the applications on the app store that aren’t Apple’s have been developed by individuals or teams that had no access to the iPad’s hardware during the process. Instead they have been using the software iPad simulator that runs emulated on computer hardware.

This means that the process of interacting with much of the third-party software leaves a lot to be desired. The heft, size and shape of the iPad in the hand works at counter-purpose to the way a lot of the apps want you to interact with them. I’m expecting this to change as these developers have now had their hands on the iPad and are in the process of getting to test their software on the actual hardware for the first time. As time goes on, I expect to see ways of interacting with apps appear that reflect the actual placement of your hands on the iPad. If you take something like the Barnes & Noble Nook for example, the placement of the page advance buttons mimic the placement of the thumbs on your hand as you hold the device with one hand as you would a book.

Apple of course had access to the iPad during development, so most of their included and for-purchase apps fare better. I say most because while the design of say YouTube, is excellent, the iBooks app is a mess. The page turn animations are useless besides an interesting tech demo to show off to friends, no one will be using them after a few weeks. Also frustrating is the inability of the iBooks app to allow you to switch the viewing mode to a much more eye-friendly white-text-on-black-background color scheme. In my extensive reading with the iPhone this has proved to be a lifesaver especially in relatively dim situations. You could argue that ibooks displays pictures which cannot be inverted in this fashion, but most books don’t include pictures, so if you were to eliminate the option for books with pictures, that would still leave the majority of the iBooks catalog much more readable. This inversion mode, by the way, is something that the Kindle app supports by default.

The iBooks app also makes very poor use of screen real estate, with large margins and “book graphics” eating up a lot of space that could be dedicated to text. Yes, it looks cool, no it’s not as usable as it could be. Apple’s obsession with mimesis was noted by Joshua Topolsky in his review of the iPad. Almost every major app mirrors a real-world object or interface, the notepad has a realistic paper texture and binding, with little bits of torn paper at the top, the iBooks app takes on the shape and form-factor of a book. It’s cool looking, but it’s just not necessary or useful after the initial “ooh” wears off. Sacrificing screen real-estate is not doing anyone any favors, even on the “larger” screen of the iPad.

By comparison, some of the apps on the iPad feel a little undercooked, like the Video app, which is stark and utilitarian, with a distinct purpose. Somewhere in the middle is where we need to be and there are some third-party apps out there on the market already that do a great job of balancing an interesting look and feel and being truly useful. The Epicurious app is a stunning example of getting it right. Crisp and clean design with great functionality are teamed up to create a really great experience that should become the template for reference apps in the future.

One thing I found interesting while poking around is that Safari is detected as the desktop version, not the mobile version. This means that you get a more desktop-like experience (minus Flash support of course). You won’t see the mobile versions of sites that you’ll see if you visit them on your iPhone and you’ll get the whole page loaded, warts and all. Another nice touch is that embedded videos (h.264 only!) play right in the page, with the option of going full-screen rather than launching the external YouTube app.

But after the nitpicking is done, you have to give most of the apps a pass, it’s still early in the life of the iPad and the really great apps that started making the iPhone a truly must-have device didn’t start showing up until well after the App Store was introduced. While this time around developers do have a head start from the years of development on the iPhone, I don’t think we’re going to start seeing truly great apps that take full advantage of the hardware for a while.

Sumupitude

“Game over man, game over!”

I’ll be the first to admit that it’s difficult to be objective when talking about the iPad. It’s a really stunning device, if not in specifications or overall capability, it’s definitely got presence. Over the course of the last 10 days, I’ve shown it to dozens of people and without exception, the first thing people do when they touch it is remark on it’s density. What they may say is, “Wow it’s thin!” or “It’s heavier than I thought!” but what they’re actually talking about is the way that it feels like a solid slab of technology, packed so densely as to defy expectations that it works the way it does. Even the iPhone doesn’t have this kind of impact, largely due to the plastic back. The iPod touch does sort of give off this vibe, but it’s hard to be overwhelmed by the smaller screen.

When they fire the iPad up and the screen blooms into life for the first time, it’s a visceral feeling. Everything about it screams quality and care in design. Although most won’t approach it with such an analytic eye, they will feel the effects. The iPad is super responsive. You don’t have to tap things twice to make them happen like on a computer, you tap them once. As a de-facto IT guy at most of my places of employment and my family’s homes, I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve seen someone click something, then double click it, then maybe double click again trying to get it to run or open and right-click contextual menus or pulldowns, forget it! The iPad doesn’t force you to interact in counter-intuitive ways. Instead it accepts inputs that have felt natural since we were 3 and finger-painting. The videos of kids interacting with the iPad prove the universal nature of the way that it feels to use and manipulate the touch surface.

Now to be straight, without a keyboard, either bluetooth or dock, you’re not going to get much work done with the iPad, but as a companion device it’s fantastic. The presentation tools and ease of manipulation make it a far better way to share information than a laptop or desktop computer. You’re going to be able to get people to interact with the information in a different way than just watching it display on a monitor. The potential as a portable portfolio alone is exciting to me as a photographer. My images have honestly never looked as good as they do on the iPad’s screen.

The iPad got a lot of flack, from me included, when the specs came out and what we saw was more evolutionary than revolutionary, but like a lot of technology, the true test is when you get one in your hands. For most devices, getting it in your hands and playing with it actually devalues the device. You see how it performs in a real-world environment and you’re disappointed by how slow the interaction is, or how dim the screen is, nothing at all like it was in the promotional video you watched on the net. With the iPad it’s the exact opposite, to be a convert, you literally have to hold and use it. If you’re not impressed by the look and feel of the iPad, you’re just being an idiot. You may find some things lacking in it’s featureset or capabilities, but you have to own up to the fact that this is probably one of the best designed and executed pieces of technology that’s ever been produced. That’s not just hyperbole either, it literally feels like holding a slab of the future in your hands.

I was fortunate to be born at the right time to see computers go from something that only an elite few ever saw or used outside of a school to something everyone carries in their pockets. As a sci-fi nut, my memories of books, movies and culture are permeated by visions of the future that range from spookily accurate to wildly fantastic and impossible. Jules Verne for instance foresaw space travel and the SCUBA tank, but these were before my time. William Gibson pretty much laid the roadmap for the internet and our virtual worlds on the internet and in games such as they exist, but these changes were gradual, sort of like boiling a crab by turning the water up. Using the iPad for the first time was like a shock of cold water.  The first time that I’ve felt like something in the real world has caught up to the things I dreamed about in bed surrounded by a wall mural of the moon, staring up at models of the Enterprise and TIE Fighters.

It’s got it’s flaws, but it’s a window into our computing future, like it or not.

The future of the iPad will largely be shaped by consumer adoption and by the developers that are at work making applications for it right now. It’s given us a blank canvas to draw on it how we will and software developers, our modern-day authors and artists, will be the ones to determine how far the canvas takes us and what we’re able to see through the window.

Should you buy an iPad?  If you’re an early adopter who buys early because you’ve got a deep seated wish to live somewhere far from now, where things are better and more wonderous, then yes.