The iPad – An Amateur Review

Yes, yet another review – but note that I am not an Apple Fanboi – Even with multiple Apple technologies – I am still a heavy user of Microsoft Windows, and also love my Blackberry Bold!

I got mine as a last minute decision on Saturday the 3rd. And I have been using it since then off and on. My kids have played with it and watched movies with it. I had it connected to WiFi most of the times – and used Clearspot from Clear extensively all over Atlanta. Let’s get the glitches, shortcomings and problems out of the way first:

1. The iPad is not an iTouch – what I mean is the iPad is potential replacement to the Netbook, it is more closer to a PC in the form factor and pricing. And hence the lack of being able to multi-task, to navigate between apps easily is virtually a requirement. As an example, I was crafting the this tweet upon reading @davewiner’s post on the iPad, and it took me about 5 minutes or so to look up Dave Winer’s Twitter handle (which I could not from Tweetdeck, get the link to the post from Safari over to Tweetdeck and then tweet it. Agreed much of it may be my typing skills or getting used to the iPad but still….

2. At launch many interesting apps are missing …. Or utility functions are missing. Such as no Google Earth or support for social bookmarking using Delicious or Xmarks 3. As I write this on the iPad I still struggle with simple things like how to re-do text that I accidentally deleted…

4. The iPhone apps are a bad experience. Once you have played with a ‘native’ iPad app – you will hate the iPhone apps running on the iPad.

5. Ergonomics – it is not easy to hold for a long time due to its weight and propping it up while lying down in the bed is a challenge! Typing on it for a longn time without an external keyboard will be a challenge.

6. Apps are kind of expensive and limited to begin with…

7. Minor stability issues – apps exit for no rhyme or reason. Don’t launch right away….

What I loved:

1. The screen is absolutely gorgeous – it is truly fantastic to experience video and photos on the iPad

2. It is the little things – when the screen is logged – you can start the picture frame feature without unlocking it!

3. The battery life is absolutely phenomenal – I have been using my iPad off and on since Saturday 11am Eastern and it finally blanked out as I was writing this post (Tuesday,10:30pm Eastern).

4. Very responsive… You may not feel like using your iTouch or iPhone after using the iPad! 5. It will be a very good ‘Dayplanner’ or organizer. The Calendar, Notes and free apps like Adobe Ideas plus many others will make you throw away the ‘Franklin-Coveys’. 6. Apps, apps, apps: Here is my round-up

First of all – all the ones I mention are free and with time and subsequent releases will (hopefully) only get better.

#1. Netflix playback is awesome – it even worked very well as we were driving on GA-400 North – kids watching Scooby Doo streaming using #2. Associated Press (AP), Thomson-Reuters Pro and USA Today apps are excellent. Very well designed. AP has a very interesting design. BBC and NPR apps are gorgeous and brilliant! You can see in all these apps the innovative use of touch and the UX capabilities of the iPhone OS.

#3. WebEx app is a cut above the best. Of course this is useful to the limited feew who use WebEx for conference calls. #4. ETrade Pro app – streaming of quotes works very well. The app is certainly more usable then its iPhone or Blackberry Bold cousins. Charting was pretty good. Hoping that future versions allow things such as the ability to maximize the watch list or portfolio windows so that you can see multiple stock listings.

#5. The two Twitter apps I tried – Tweetdeck and Twitterrific need a lot more work. But they are good to get started…

#6. Browsing sites like Google Reader, Flickr, even Posterous was a wonderful experience.

#7. The larger screen makes using the Email app even more easier. I even setup my corporate email and accessed it using VPN. Net-net it is a fantastic device. And knowing Apple the shortcoming will be addressed soon enough. If you have the disposable income – go get it. But if you don’t or you can wait to get an even better iPad or maybe cheaper wait till Christmas…

More to follow, this full post was done totally on the iPad. No finishing touches using the PC – written using the Notes application. And now planning to email it using the Email app to Posterous…

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Ashu Joshi
+1 678 551 ASHU (2748)
http://www.linkedin.com/in/AshuJoshi
Ignore the brevity | mistakes, sent from my iPad
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