It's substantial but surprisingly light. Easy to grip. Beautiful. Rigid. Starkly designed. The glass is a little rubbery but it could be my sweaty hands. And it's fasssstttt.
Apple didn't really sell this point, but it's the single biggest benefit of the iPad: speed. It feels at least a generation faster than the iPhone 3GS. Lags and waits are gone, and the OS and apps respond just as quickly as you'd hope. Rotating between portrait and landscape modes, especially, is where this new horsepower manifests in the OS.
Build
Imagine, if you will, a super light unibody MacBook Pro that's smaller, thinner and way, way, way lighter. Or, from a slightly different perspective, think about a bigger iPhone that's been built with unibody construction. The iPad really does feel like some amalgamation of these two product lines from Apple. And, in the hands, it feels great—not too heavy at all.
The screen looked nice, and it's able to display even small text crisply. Touch responds like a dream.
But one point of the build seems odd. It's the Home button. In portrait mode, hitting the Home button is far less natural than on an iPhone because your thumbs naturally rest in the middle of each side of the case (not the bottom). A Kindle-like side Home button may not have been a horrible idea, even if it broke up the stoic minimalism of the case a bit.
iBooks
It's an optical illusion, but just seeing the depth of pages makes the iBook app feel more like a book than a Kindle ever did for me. The text is sharp, and while the screen is bright, it doesn't seem to strains the eyes—but time will tell on that.
Keyboard
Typing in portrait is better than anticipated but still quite a stretch for our average-sized hands, which means that letters like F G and H will take a moderate conditioning for some. What about in landscape mode, sitting flat on the table? Well this is problematic too, as the iPad sort of wobbles. The back is not perfectly flat, meaning your typing surface is never perfectly flat, so the virtual keyboard becomes that much more difficult to use.
Pictures
Pinch, zoom, whatever—like we said, it's fast—the photo app is faster than iPhoto performs on an aging Core2Duo laptop. Apps
Apps can play in their native resolution, or be 2x uprezzed for the screen. How does it look? An ATV game we tried actually looked pretty good—limited more by its base polygon count than the scaling process itself. Bottom line: it's about as elegant solution as Apple could have offered, even if that graphics won't be razor sharp.
Browsing
Over Wi-Fi, Gizmodo loaded quickly. The 9.7-inch screen is an excellent size for reading the site. You can pinch zoom, but you won't need to. Of course, on such a pretty web browsing experience, not having Flash makes the big, empty video boxes in the middle of a page is pretty disappointing. Put differently, the fatal flaw of Apple's mobile browser has never been more apparent.
When we first heard the rumor of a kickstand for the tablet, we laughed. But actually, Apple's case/kickstand makes sense. It's made from leather, and works as both a case and stand, optimizing your movie viewing.
Really, it's taking the Kindle's leather case and one-upping it with the kickstand functionality. I'm going to go out on a limb here, and say that this is definitely worth buying, if you want to protect that $499 investment. But inevitably, the third-party accessories ecosystem will provide many more, cheaper cases.
When we first heard the rumor of a kickstand for the tablet, we laughed. But actually, Apple's case/kickstand makes sense. It's made from leather, and works as both a case and stand, optimizing your movie viewing.
Really, it's taking the Kindle's leather case and one-upping it with the kickstand functionality. I'm going to go out on a limb here, and say that this is definitely worth buying, if you want to protect that $499 investment. But inevitably, the third-party accessories ecosystem will provide many more, cheaper cases.
Thought you could get away with spending just $499 on the iPad? Oh no. There's going to be an official Apple keyboard dock for easier typing, which Jobs himself demonstrated the need for earlier with his few typos.
The keyboard looks just like the normal Apple keyboard, and actually makes the iPad stand upright, so it's like a mini iMac set-up.
Thought you could get away with spending just $499 on the iPad? Oh no. There's going to be an official Apple keyboard dock for easier typing, which Jobs himself demonstrated the need for earlier with his few typos.
The keyboard looks just like the normal Apple keyboard, and actually makes the iPad stand upright, so it's like a mini iMac set-up. Really, this is probably the safest way of typing we can see—far better than the alternatives we suggested, which included a stylus. Gulp.
Full pricing: The 16GB, Wi-Fi-only version costs $500, while the 32GB is $600 and 64GB is $700. Pricing increases by $130 to add 3G. The Wi-Fi-only models ship in 60 days, while 3G models will ship in 90. [Apple iPad]
Full pricing: The 16GB, Wi-Fi-only version costs $500, while the 32GB is $600 and 64GB is $700. Pricing increases by $130 to add 3G. The Wi-Fi-only models ship in 60 days, while 3G models will ship in 90. [Apple iPad]
Full pricing: The 16GB, Wi-Fi-only version costs $500, while the 32GB is $600 and 64GB is $700. Pricing increases by $130 to add 3G. The Wi-Fi-only models ship in 60 days, while 3G models will ship in 90. [Apple iPad]
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When we first heard the rumor of a kickstand for the tablet, we laughed. But actually, Apple's case/kickstand makes sense. It's made from leather, and works as both a case and stand, optimizing your movie viewing.
Thought you could get away with spending just $499 on the iPad? Oh no. There's going to be an official Apple keyboard dock for easier typing, which Jobs himself demonstrated the need for earlier with his few typos.
