“I have only spent a short time hands-on with the iPad–too short to fully run it through its paces and formally review it yet. But, after attending the rollout of the new device today, and trying out some of its features for myself, I have some first impressions,” Walter S. Mossberg writes for AllThingsD.
“On the plus side, the device is handsome, feels comfortable and solid to hold, and has all that beautiful software built in,” Mossberg writes. “Oh, and it’s amazingly low-priced for an Apple product, with that modest $499 price tag for a base version… It also boasts a decent 10 hours of battery life, and Mr, Jobs told me after the event that, for some functions, like playing video and music, the battery should last even longer… iPad will run most of the current 140,000 iPhone apps, either in a small window on the screen, or in a full-screen mode. That’s a huge plus for a new device.”
“But there are minuses. First, since it’s too big to go in a pocket, people might perceive it as just another thing to carry around, despite the fact that it’s only a half inch thick and weighs just 1.5 pounds. It also lacks a common and popular laptop feature–a web cam. So, it can’t be used for video chats or for the creation of web videos,” Mossberg writes. “Also, the carrier for the iPad’s 3G plan is the deeply unpopular AT&T.”
Direct link to video via AllThingsD here.
“Finally, while it’s too early for me to say without lots of testing, the size of the iPad’s virtual keyboard may be a liability. I found it almost too wide for thumb typing, and a colleague who’s a whiz at touch typing and tried it briefly found it awkward to type on. Apple is offering an auxiliary physical keyboard that docks with, and charges, the iPad,” Mossberg writes. “But you won’t want to lug that around.”
MacDailyNews Take: It depends. You might want to “lug” that keyboard around. Say, if you’re on a cross-country plane flight and you know you’re going to be writing in Pages, for example. The iPad Keyboard Dock certainly seems light and thin enough to slip into a backpack along with the thin and light iPad. And, for normal “typing” on-to-go, the iPad’s on-screen keyboard(s) just might work out better than Mossberg and his nameless colleague think after a brief, cursory test. After all, new keyboards, be they virtual or not, usually feel “awkward” at first and take some getting used to.
Mossberg continues, “Still, the software looked impressive, and that could help Steve Jobs do the one thing even he has never done in an amazing career: get the public to love not just a better version of an existing type of gadget, but a whole new category of gadget.”
There’s much more in the full article – recommended – here.
Steve looks healthy. That should rattle the short sellers.
If the iPad were an at bat in baseball, I would say this intro was a long ball hit high and over the fence but just slightly foul. In other words, strike 1. A long strike. A promising strike. A thrilling strike. But it is still a miss, so far.
However there are at least two swings left before the thing rolls out in 60 days, and I am hopeful that multitasking will be added to iPhone OS 4 (god! rename this thing already!) and thusly the iTab and that the iTab,s NC (and cloud) capabilities will be further established. Also book and magazine publishers as well as app developers will have a lot to add to this mix before it even is ready to sell. So we will see.
“As a student, I wish there was a stylus for note taking.”
Same for me as a teacher. Typing notes while you are observing is a no-go.
I wonder if a 3rd party will not come up with something like that.
But I wish Apple would do it. I think they are missing something on that. The handwriting recognition at the end of Newton was good. And I also had a Toshiba PDA, honestly, that had good handwriting recognition. The rest of it was junk and it failed repeatedly after about 3 months, but it could recognize my terrible handwriting.
Missing an opportunity here.
Apple was focused on cost so they left out a couple of things. Encoding H.264 video takes a lot of power, and will kill battery time, I see this as being two years off.
It will be interesting to see if textbook publishers quickly embrace the iPad format. The ability to offer up-to-date information and multimedia within the “text” could be game-changing. In turn, if students adopt the iPad because it displaces cumbersome books and offers (potentially) less expensive versions of traditional textbooks, it will be a huge success. Students will become comfortable with the format and continue to use it long after leaving college. This Trojan Horse effect may ultimately prove to be what entrenches the platform into society. That and an incredible number of apps to truly customize the user experience. I can’t wait to see what the developers will have to offer!
@Randian: I couldn’t agree more!
“Undeniable Truth 53014: A great many people’s self-worth today is determined, in direct proportion, by how much the world disappoints them. Absolutely nothing meets expectations in scope and functionality, everything is overpriced and out-of-reach for the “average” person, quality control and service/support after the sale stink, marketing is dishonest and deceitful, etc., etc., etc.”
if you want to “Lug” a keyboard, you can already buy a 1.6lb 11″ screen notebook from Sony which with the keyboard built in is only as thick as the iPad, (or the iPad is only as thick as the Sony since it came second). So same size and weight as iPad, but it’s a full x86 notebook capable of running Windows or Mac OS X, with a twice as fast processor, running standard software with standard peripheral ports, a couple of gig of memory and reasonable amount of storage, not just the world’s biggest cellphone.
So if multi-tasking is so damned important, why are three of the most popular apps for Droid phones, apps that let you shut down background apps?
Sounds like a check off item to me. I won’t buy it if it doesn’t have multi-tasking but I won’t use that feature. because I don’t like it.
LOL!
I think multi-task management in a modal operating system was the trick Apple was supposed to be going to solve. It seems to me that using the dock and dashboard and maybe expose from OSX could handle this. Maybe make the quick dock on the bottom be the multi-tasking apps which could be accessed and managed. Mutli-tasking is not always necessary and it could be more of an opt-in method but working usually requires multi-tasking–so I’m not sure why there is confusion of the desirability of the function.
Multi-tasking is of no use to the chess players in the park who will be using iPads from now on
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Come to think of it, the iPad’s a Two-person game board in general …
note to self … download that sdk very soon …
Notice at 5:15 how the idiot journalist tried to drive the stupid ‘Apple vs Google’ nonsense.
Of all the dumb “missing” things to whine about, a webcam is about the dumbest…
mossberg really adds nothing interesting anymore, actually i dont think he ever has.
“So if multi-tasking is so damned important, why are three of the most popular apps for Droid phones, apps that let you shut down background apps?”
By the fact that the most popular apps are those which help you effectively manage all the background apps you have running, you conclude that people don’t want background apps?
Interesting.
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