I’VE ME AN IPAD!

Today was launch day! The infamous Apple iPad made it’s way to consumers today. Unlike the thousands of others that pre-ordered it, I decided not to. Partially, I wasn’t intending to jump on board with release one, and the fact that I’ve not done anything significant on the iPhone made the purchase decision a little harder to justify. So, I was going to let it pass and maybe pick one up after all the hoopla died down. But my wife called me today, while I was waiting for my son’s morning classes to end (normally a little after 9:30am), and she said she would meet me over at Best Buy, and we would try our luck – usually waiting on line for anything usually doesn’t turn out well for me, my luck normally isn’t that good. I’ve meet with many black friday/launch day failures, so my hopes weren’t too high. I arrived at Best Buy in time to see it open and I saw my wife go in with a few others who I assume were also waiting in line. Upon entering and meeting up with my wife near the back of the store, she told me, to my surprise, they had enough for everyone waiting! So after waiting for a bit in line, and humorously watching the Best Buy reps unbox a big box to unbox a smaller box to pull out the iPad box, I soon went home with a 32GB version.

Unboxing and Initial Impressions

I won’t bore you all with how cool the box is, because well, it’s a box, and true to Apple, it’s minimalistic, and the iPad fit in almost completely edge to edge in the box. It’s interesting to note that the box is padded to make it taller, which I guess is to make it more store shelf friendly, otherwise it would be a pretty thin box.

Holding the device for the first time, I was treated to the usual Apple quality I’ve come accustomed to. The iPad is well made. The back is the same type of metal used in their laptops, so durability shouldn’t be and issue. When I first saw images of the iPad, I thought the bezel around the device looked ugly, and an unnecessary design option, but upon holding the device, it turns out it does have a purpose, which is to be a place to put your thumb, something that didn’t need considering for the iPhone due to it’s smaller size. In general, to no one’s surprise, it looks like a big iPod Touch, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Apps and Impressions on Using the iPad

Upon turning it on, I was surprised to see that the battery was fully charged, and was pretty much ready to use, well almost, you still need to hook it up to iTunes first, but after that, it was ready to go. I hooked it up to my wireless network with ease, and synced some of my apps to the phone. I hit Safari and surfed around to some sites and typed out a few messages. I am very impressed with the new form factor, the size of the iPad makes a very big difference in it’s usability. Compared to the cramped quarters of my iPhone, the iPad is a pleasure to use. Typing on the larger on screen keyboard feels more like typing on a real keyboard, I can actually use more than one finger to type! I always suspected that the new form factor would really make this device successful, and so far, it’s proving true, everything feels so much better to use!

I loaded a bunch of my iPhone apps on, just to see how they would work. Navigon, Metal Gear Solid, Time Crisis, Tetris, Facebook and a few others. My son put the iPad to the test with Kid’s vs Zombies, and it works quite well, although he complained about the screen shrinking back down to 1x size from the 2x size option. But I think that’s because he unknowingly hits the little button on the lower right that enlarges the iPhone app. Navigon threw me back to the desktop when I touched the Show Map button, so I guess the iPad doesn’t have a full fledge GPS in it (someone correct me if I’m wrong, I didn’t bother looking that spec up). Facebook worked like a charm, and Tetris played pretty nice.

Overall, the iPad is a pretty impressive device, but honestly, I can’t call it the magical and revolutionary device Apple’s marketing touts it is. Will this device fail? No, honestly, I can’t see that. Mainly because, even though Apple didn’t make me the tablet I wanted, they were smart in leveraging the large developer community fostered by the iPhone, because honestly, it was the developers that helped make the iPhone the monster it is today, and these same developers will do the same for the iPad.

Next thing for me to do now is update my SDK, and see if I can start making some apps for this new platform, and see what other things I can make this thing do.