The iPad has passed its first test. A handful of early reviewers for outlets such as the The New York Times and BoingBoing agreed that, despite minor flaws, Apple’s much-anticipated device is a pleasure to use and could signal the birth of a new category of personal computing.
Check back here over the weekend and in the days to come for a thorough run-down from our own reviewers, Paul Taylor and Chris Nuttall.
Highlights from the first reviews after the jump.
Omar Wasow of The Root silences early skeptics who said the iPad would be nothing more than a large iPhone/iPod touch:
Saying the iPad is just a big iPod Touch is like saying HD video is just TV with a bigger picture. While such a statement may be technically true, it misses the deeper fact that higher resolution experiences are often radically better than their lower-resolution cousins. Watching a film on an iPhone is a pleasure when my only option is an inane in-flight movie but, given the choice, I’d much rather watch on the bigger, crisper screen like that on a laptop or iPad. I can skim a PDF on my iPod Touch but, for a 30-page document, I’d go mad without a larger display like that on a Kindle DX or the iPad. For sharing one or two digital photos, a mobile phone screen is good enough but, for slideshows with dozens of pictures, only an easy-to-use digital picture frame like Kodak’s PULSE or an iPad makes any sense. The iPad’s enhanced screen and processing power are not just incrementally better than the prior generations of iPods and iPhones, for many applications the iPad will offer a fundamentally different experience.
Playing devils advocate, David Pogue in The New York Times points out one of the iPad’s flaws, though he ultimately comes down in favour:
When the iPad is upright, typing on the on-screen keyboard is a horrible experience; when the iPad is turned 90 degrees, the keyboard is just barely usable (because it’s bigger). A $70 keyboard dock will be available in April, but then you’re carting around two pieces.
At least Apple had the decency to give the iPad a really fast processor. Things open fast, scroll fast, load fast. Surfing the Web is a heck of a lot better than on the tiny iPhone screen – first, because it’s so fast, and second, because you don’t have to do nearly as much zooming and panning.
The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg explains who the iPad is for:
If you’re mainly a Web surfer, note-taker, social-networker and emailer, and a consumer of photos, videos, books, periodicals and music – this could be for you. If you need to create or edit giant spreadsheets or long documents, or you have elaborate systems for organizing email, or need to perform video chats, the iPad isn’t going to cut it as your go-to device.
BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin’s review addresses the future of iPad apps:
Maybe the most exciting thing about iPad is the apps that aren’t here yet. The book-film-game hybrid someone will bust out in a year, redefining the experience of each, and suggesting some new nouns and verbs in the process. Or an augmented reality lens from NASA that lets you hold the thing up to the sky and pinpoint where the ISS is, next to what constellation, read the names and see the faces of the crew members, check how those fuel cells are holding up.
I like it a lot. But it’s the things I never knew it made possible – to be revealed or not in the coming months – that will determine whether I love it.
