freeform goodness

This is third in an indeterminate series of posts about my experiences with the iPad I bought on 2010-Apr-12.

There were a lot of fanciful hardware designs being bandied about by people before the launch of the iPad. There were things that had all sorts of ports, buttons, and frippery, obviously coming from people how haven’t been paying attention to the ruthlessly minimal designs coming from Apple for years.

I didn’t really pay any attention to them, because I knew that externally, anything they shipped would be a moderately sized piece of aluminum and glass wrapped around some very understated functional engineering. It would be something with no fans, no battery covers, and the bare minimum of external controls and ports.

In retrospect, the idea of scaling up the iPhone/iPod touch form was the most logical thing they could have done. This device isn’t being aimed at the neckbeards on Engadget whipping out their spec sheets and measuring units, it’s a device aimed quite specifically at the tens of millions of people whose first experience with Apple was the iPod and/or iPhone. The end result is a device that has a very small number of external controls and interfaces that will feel completely familiar to lots of people. It’s the gadget equivalent of printing “Don’t Panic” across the front in large, friendly letters. It so happens that the chosen form factor is very comfortable for sitting on a couch or an easy chair. There was some grousing that they went with a 4:3 aspect ratio instead of 16:9, but 4:3 makes a lot more sense if you expect that the device is going to spend as much time oriented vertically as horizontally.

After a week of carrying an iPad around in various contexts, I’m very pleased with the form factor. It is a very comfortable thing to carry. The weight, which is somewhat greater than I’d expected, gives the thing a reassuring feeling of solidity. I know, intellectually, that a great part of the weight is the fairly massive battery assembly, but it really gives the impression of being a solid block of aluminum in the hand. As you would expect from an Apple device, the whole thing feels very constructed: there arent any gaps or seams, and there is no “flex” when you grasp the opposite corners in your hands and apply slight twisting pressure. The weight isn’t all good, though. When reading in bed, it’s definitely noticeable if you’re trying to hold the device in one hand. One and a half pounds may not sound like much, but when you’re lying on your back supporting it at eye level, it’s quite noticeably heavier than you’d probably like.

As I stated earlier, it never warms to the touch, even when playing video. There’s some serious hardware witchcraft in this little slab.

All of my performance remarks are subjective. I have an iPhone 3G, and the iPad is dramatically faster in all aspects than the phone. Switching between screens on the Springboard has no delay at all. As stated earlier, the browser is desktop-fast. I don’t know how much of this can be ascribed to the A4 chip, the video hardware, or low-level OS tweaks, but the performance is really quite remarkable.

The multitouch screen is very responsive, of course. I’ll come back to this in a later post, but the iPhoneOS UI really comes into its own when paired with an extra large control surface. There are all sorts of interface niceties that work better on the iPad than on the iPhone, simply because there’s so much more screen and control surface area to work with. The battery life and charging experience is worth a whole post on its own. Suffice to say, being able to get 10+ hours on a charge, even under intensive use, is a huge win.

One minor complaint I have about the form factor is, since the device is perfectly happy to work in any of the 4 possible orientations, it’s very easy to lose track of where the external controls are. I often find myself reaching for the rotation lock or volume controls, only to find they’re on a different edge of the iPad than I thought.

Next up: the included software.

:: Dave Walker 21:49 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/tech/gadgets/iPad]
:: tags: iPad

:: Comments (0)

This is first in an indeterminate series of posts about my experiences with the iPad I bought on 2010-Apr-12.

I got the 32GB WiFi model.

I tried to resist, honestly. Come on, laugh at the early adopter.

The itch became unbearable the weekend following the big launch. I started calling the local Apple stores (there are 4 in the Greater Detroit area) and all of them were completely sold out on Sunday (4/11). I called again at lunchtime the following Monday, and the Troy store (~10 minutes from the office) had the 32 and 64 GB models.

I had quite a few people ask me how I liked it when I first bought it, and I pretty much said exactly the same thing to everyone: I’ve only used it a few hours; ask me again after I’ve used it for a week.

So it’s been a week, and I figured that this was as good an opportunity as any to brush the cobwebs off my poor, neglected weblog. My plan as of now is to break this into a series of smaller posts that will run 1-2 per day until I’m tired of hearing myself blab. I’m projecting about a half-dozen moderate length posts, as of now.

I’m not claiming I have any unique insights, but I’ll offer the perspective of someone who already owns a bucketload of Apple gear and a netbook. Since one of the big debates among the dorkerati was whether the iPad is more or less useful than a netbook, I’ll talk about things from that direction, too.

:: Dave Walker 06:46 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/tech/gadgets/iPad]
:: tags: iPad

:: Comments (2)

This is second in an indeterminate series of posts about my experiences with the iPad I bought on 2010-Apr-12.

One mistake the Slashdot/Engadget/Digg crowds always make is assuming that their harware use cases are universal: “It won’t play my 2 terabytes of Ogg Vorbis files stored on an NFS server. I can’t self-host the entire GNU toolchain, therefore it’s useless…” I will try to avoid that here.

I’ve written in this space before about our Acer Aspire netbook. It’s basically the third computer in the house — where I use my desktop (a G5 tower) and my office laptop (a 13-inch MacBook) as machines to “get things done”, the Ubuntu-based netbook has pretty much functioned for a small set of tasks:

1. Lightweight web browsing (e.g. acessing Wikipedia, the IMDB, etc.) when sitting on the couch watching TV.
2. A smart terminal for logging into the other machines to compile code, move files around the network, mess around with the home router, etc.)
3. A really portable machine for times when hauling around even my 7-pound Macbook and accessories feels like overkill. (I took it on our December cruise, for example, and I take it to neighborhood coffee shops sometimes)
4. A small (but still bigger than a smartphone) media player

I will now say, that for the way that I have used a netbook, the iPad is in most respects a (much) superior platform.

1. As it stands, the iPad is one of the most pleasing web-browsing experiences available right now. The installed build of Mobile Safari is almost unreasonably fast, on a device that, as I read specs, sports a single 1GHz RISC core. I haven’t benchmarked it, but what’s important is that it feels fast. Pages pop, the rendering and reflow feels close to instant, subjectively faster than my desktop G5 and on par with my MacBook. It is far faster than a current Chrome build on the Atom-powered Acer netbook. It’s not just the speed, though. There is something very natural about browsing the web on a magazine-sized device propped against your leg in an easy chair. Mobile Safari very wisely stays out of the way, with minimal browser chrome and widgets in your face. All the pinch and zoom and double-tap to resize DIV stuff you’re probably familiar with from the iPhone platform is still there, but with a 4x larger browsing surface it really feels like no-compromise web browsing. You’ve still got the “gravitational” fingertip scrolling that’s so pleasant on the iPhone, too. Speaking for myself, the absence of Flash is a feature, not a bug.
2. As a terminal for interacting with other devices, the netbook wins because of its full (cramped) keyboard. That said, for the types of device access I tend to do on weekends (e.g. changing router settings, etc.) the win isn’t a huge one.
3. The iPad is far more usably portable than a netbook. It gets far better battery life (10+ hours vs. 3), is absolutely cool to the touch (the netbook gets very warm in the lap), occupies less space (no pop up screen) in use, and has no fans.
4. The netbook plays (theoretically) more media formats, but with Handbrake and Air Video, getting any format to the iPad has become pretty trivial. The netbook struggles mightily with fullscreen h.264, as well. As a fairly frequent business traveler, I’m looking forward to taking the iPad on long flights. Everything I’ve heard suggests that getting 4 full-length films on a single battery charge is not unreasonable.

It’s true that the iPad is currently more expensive than most netbook-class machines, but not unreasonably so.

:: Dave Walker 06:45 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/tech/gadgets/iPad]
:: tags: iPad

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