I
made the fan pilgrimage Saturday past - to the Apple
mothership store in downtown San Francisco. I found a queue around the
street, and a thousand Apple fanboys and fangirls excitedly waiting for the doors
to open at 9.00. The goal - to be amongst the first with a brand
spanking new iPad.
I
had mine by ~9.45, less than an hour after the
store opened. Now that I've played with it a few days, I want to share my first
impressions.
I realized I had access to a full spectrum of home computing
platforms:
· Desktop:
Apple iMac, 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo, 20”
screen
· Laptop: Lenovo T400, powered by a 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo P8400
· Netbook:
10.1”
screen model from a top OEM, with an
Atom processor and a solid state drive
· Tablet:
iPad, with its Apple A4 processor
· Smartphone:
iPhone 3GS, Google Nexus One
Each of these devices have
their advantages for different use cases. While the iPad is positioned as a new sort of device, it's closest in size and computing power to a netbook.
How
does it compare? If you want the five-cent summary, here it is: the netbook
category now has a dangerous competitor breathing down its back, and the black
and white e-reader has a lot to worry about, too.
That’s not to say the iPad does not have some real
shortcomings. Those may be addressed soon by its coming
competitors—a wave of tablets, powered by Intel Atom processors, from manufacturers like
Hewlett-Packard and Acer. Not to mention the fact that the iPad is not
cheap: you’ll
pay a minimum of $499 to get out the door with an iPad, and they will eventually
top out over $800; quite a bit to pay for a machine that is being marketed as a
companion device for your main computer.
When I had an iPad in my hands, the hypotheticals melted away; after using it for a bit, all I can say, is that it simply rocks.
In use, it’s a completely different experience from either
using a netbook or a smartphone. The iPad, with its tight integration between
its proprietary A4 chip and the iPhone OS, is extremely responsive beneath your
finger tips. That is the nub - the touch-screen interface makes interacting with the Web and with all
those "apps" a more personal and intuitive experience. The fact that with a
finger and thumb pinch, you can expand articles or pictures to fill the entire
screen, or swipe them away with a flip of a finger, is fantastic.
People continue to ask me what I think I can do with the iPad, as if it's some great mystery. Actually, I’m doing a lot of things I've always
wanted to do on a notebook, but never comfortably could: I can hold an iPad one hand while reading headlines, and have my tea with the other (you know, like
you used to be able to do with newsprint or “magazines”). Or, at lunch, eat with one hand, and
be able to browse various web pages with the other.
Watching movies
becomes immersive, and easy to do while sitting on a settee or chair,
because the whole device is basically a just screen and is easy to
hold.
I've
found the iPad a great data input and content assembly device: because the iPad boots up
nearly instantly, you can be in an app like Evernote with two touches of your
finger and instantly be jotting down your latest fit of start-up whimsy. The same applies to social media like Facebook: the ease of access makes an enormous difference.
These are simple changes in usage patterns but they
are a revelation; you no longer have that “I'm using a computer” feel when you are using the iPad, which is utterly
addictive. My netbook is getting pretty lonely, and even the iMac is getting
less love. The trusty T400, of course, is still getting much use, as
it’s the only way to access corporate applications. Yet, I’m
actually writing this on the iPad -- albeit with an optional Bluetooth
keyboard.
Until the answering
wave of tablets from other OEMs hit the market, the iPad for now is aimed at the
netbook market. As an owner of both here's how, subjectively,
they stack up:
· Screen:
The iPad touch screen is gorgeous, typical of Apple displays. Its uses TFT
technology which allows it to be viewed from a wide variety of viewing angles.
The killer app of course is that it’s
touch sensitive, and it’s
extremely responsive. You can zoom in—with
your fingers—on
web pages to make small stories fill the screen; or you can easily rotate and
resize photos and charts inside documents and presentations. The screen on my netbook is actually quite
impressive too—bright,
with a glossy surface and deep, intense colors. But the iPad wins this one hands
down.
· Battery
life:
I used the iPad constantly over the weekend and easily got more than 12
hours of usage. Apple claims the battery will last 10 hours even with energy
intensive usages like movies. With my netbook, even with a power saving Solid
State Drive (SSD), I rarely got four hours.
· Keyboard:
The iPad uses an on-screen keyboard that is about 85-90% the size of netbook
keyboards. It’s
extremely sensitive, and so you
can’t
rest your fingers on it, the way that you can a real keyboard, without
accidentally typing unwanted characters. Some writers say they’ve
already gotten used to it. I haven’t.
I'm mainly answering emails with it. But as a bit of a power typist, for the
times that I will want to do major writing on the iPad—which
I define as more than a couple hundred words—I
will use a wireless Bluetooth keyboard.
The netbook, on the other hand, does have a dedicated keyboard. But it's
also pretty cramped. I originally thought I would use the netbook a lot for
writing, but I've found the keys are just a little too small to make that an
appetizing prospect. Nonetheless, it’s
a real, dedicated keyboard, and so the netbook is a winner here.
· Weight
and size:
You really have to hold the iPad in your hands to appreciate how slim, yet solid
it is. It’s
only 0.5 inches thick, 9.5 inches long and about 7.5 inches wide, giving it a
slightly larger footprint than a typical netbook, which are about 10 inches by 6
inches and about an inch high. The iPad however weighs 1.5 pounds, compared to a
minimum of 2.5 pounds for most netbooks. 1.5 pounds is light enough to hold with
one hand--though if you do that, it can get heavy fast. But the netbook is for
tabletop and laps only--you're not going to hold it in one hand comfortably.
· Connectivity:
The iPad comes with the same 30-pin connector that connects iPhones to desktop
computers and chargers. That’s
it: no USB, no FireWire, no SD slot. I use SD cards, not every day, but pretty
consistently, to transfer photos and sound files, and even the occasional
document. To me, this is the iPad’s
big "FAIL." I can't believe there's no SD card slot. My netbook has an
integrated SD card slot, two USB slots, and video and audio outputs.
It’s
a full-fledged computer in that respect, and it’s
the lack of connectivity ports that most makes some people call the iPad a toy.
Netbook wins this hands down.
· Apps:
The iPad already has more than 3,000 apps available for it. The three that
I’m
using the most are Evernote, an app that allows you store notes, web clippings
and photos in “the
cloud,”
the New York Times’
beautiful “Editor’s
Choice”
app, and the Netflix app, which makes its unbelievably easy to stream movies to
the iPad. Oh, and Pages, the slick iPad touch-optimized word processor that I'm
writing this piece with. The netbook, of course, can run most apps that are
available on Windows 7—including
our old standbys, Word, Excel, Outlook and Powerpoint, and the AppUp store is
adding new netbook-optimized applications daily.
· Processor:
This is a tough one. There are few specs about the Apple A4 chip, except that
it's ARM based. I've read that its speed is 1GHz, compared to the 1.6GHz of many
Atom processors. Why does the iPad feel as fast as it does? Hard to say -- I
think it’s
because Apple was able to optimize its chip for the iPad's operating system,
which is a variant of the iPhone OS. My netbook uses Windows Vista, which, while
it's a solid OS, was not optimized from the ground up for netbooks. That's why
the software work Intel is doing with MeeGo and Moblin is so exciting--we may
finally see an OS that is just as intuitive and easy to use as Apple's in the
near future.
For me, the iPad, whilst not the "magical device" imagined by some, is a
paradigm-shifting device, which will have a big impact on the world of computing.
