I wrote this blog piece a month ago (warning, it's a thousand words, but if you want to read it, be my guest):
The iPad
Yesterday, the iPad was launched internationally. In the true spirit of an Apple 'fanboy' I have tested the device for 3 days to fully appreciate it and write a meaningful review.
One word many fanboys use to describe every new piece of technology Steve's team has conjured at Apple is magic. No major technology company in the world has had as much success as Apple at transforming fringe technology into mainstream devices that capture the imagination of the world. I could go back as far as the Macintosh to give examples of this power of transformation, but I believe the first real breakthrough that put Apple on its way to becoming the world's technology leader is the iPod. By redefining the old concept of the Walkman and 'mobile' cassette player, Apple forever changed the way we listen to music.
Apple have a penchant for finding new ways to apply the technology that they develop to new devices. You take the iPod, slap on a piece of multitouch glass, the most intuitive mobile operating system that builds on the iPod software, basic telephone capabilities, a camera as an afterthought, and extend the concept of the iTunes store to allow software developers sell small applications and voilà, you've defined the smartphone!
In much the same way, the first impression one gets of the iPad is that Apple have gone one step further and super sized the iPod touch to create a new piece of 'magic' to capture the imagination of the world. Like the iPod that redefined mobile music, and the iPhone that redefined the phone, one's tempted to say the iPad is Apple's attempt to redefine the tablet PC. I'd be tempted to agree with this view, except that I'm not quite sure I'd even go as far as calling the iPad a tablet PC... it really doesn't feel like a PC in its functionality. Neither will I disparage the device as a super sized smartphone or iPod touch. For starters, it doesn't make your typical phone call, if you discount Skype, and its a lot more capable than an iPod. It feels different from Apple's previous innovations. The iPod is an evolved Walkman. The iPhone is an evolved mobile phone. It's a lot more difficult (not necessarily impossible) to strictly categorise the ipad as a natural progression of any other single existing device.
In his address at the unveiling of the iPad, Steve jobs mentioned that the target with the iPad was to create a new category of device that does a number of things better than both a smartphone and a notebook. The iPad is designed to be the ultimate device for browsing the web, email, viewing photos, watching video and youtube, listening to music, viewing maps, playing games and manipulating documents on the go. To sum it up, the iPad was designed to be the ultimate personal media consumption device. Whether it delivers on this is open to debate.
I have decided to use the targets set for the iPad as a framework for reviewing the device. In other words, is it really the ultimate media device that does browsing, email, photos, video, music, maps and on-the-go document manipulation better than a notebook or smartphone? But with many other devices, the iPad, I believe, will find many new unintended applications. I will discuss some of the trends that have emerged this early on in the life of the device.
The Hardware and Operating System:
The iPad is 9.5" tall, 7.5" wide and 0.5" thick. It weighs just 1.5 lbs (add an insignificant 0.1 lbs for the 3G model). It looks a lot smaller in person than it does in pictures, but I'd say it's pleasantly smaller in this respect. It also feels lighter than I expected - about as heavy as a typical paperback textbook. It has an aluminium casing that makes it solid to touch and what feels like a polymer coating that makes it smoother to touch. Its overall physical appearance shares a great deal of semblance with the iPod touch. It has a rectangular form with the front dominated by a large display, straight edges, rounded corners and a slightly curved back profile with the prominent Apple logo centred.The Apple logo is a plastic inlay that occludes the Wifi antenna. The overall impression about the build is that it is solid, rugged and durable. The iPad should take a fair bit of wear and tear without falling apart. I would however strongly recommend any potential owner gets a case to go with it.
The most prominent hardware component of the ipad is obviously the 9.7" IPS LED-backlit XVGA Capacitive Multitouch Display with oleophobic coating. Breaking down the geek-speak, it has a great view from practically every possible viewing angle, it is a very bright screen that produces evenly lit pictures with brilliant colour, it produces high definition images, it is highly sensitive to finger gestures and resists smudging from greasy fingers. The screen is really brilliant... much better than anything I've seen on any device of this size. Images are crisp and colours are vivid. The screen excels at touch. It is much better than the touch on the iPhone and iPod touch. The screen is highly responsive and all that extra space makes it even that much better.
Related to touch is the keyboard, both in landscape and portrait mode. My initial expectation was that a Bluetooth keyboard was an essential accessory for serious typing. To my surprise, the keyboard is highly usable. This entire review has been composed on an iPad. And while I can only compose at about 30-40 words per minute (half my maximum speed on a full desktop keyboard) and I make twice as many mistakes (which are almost always automatically corrected unlike a PC keyboard), the touch keyboard is sufficient for composing thoughts, essays, study and personal notes, email and chat amongst other day-to-day uses.
Other external features of the iPad are 4 buttons (power, volume, screen rotation lock, and home), a 3.5mm headphone jack (for standard and apple headphones), a microphone, speakers and the standard apple mobile device port.
The screen rotation lock is essential. The iPad has no natural orientation - no up or down. Applications and the interface switch to optimise the use of the orientation that the device is held. This can however be a pain if one is, for example, reading or watching video in bed. The lock allows you to fix the orientation to suit the purpose.
The iPad has a built in microphone, which is necessary for a number of apps. Surprisingly I found that the iPad did not come with two functions of the iPhone OS that use the mic - Voice Control and Voice Memos. This is a confounding omission on Apple's part. They are added functionalities that take little away from the device. Skype was the only way I could test the microphone immediately and the quality was as good as I expected.
As an audiophile, I am very particular about the quality of sound reproduction, especially in the sound range of string instrumentals. While I could be more thorough in the description of various aspects of the sound quality, I find that the most intuitive way to describe the sound quality is to compare it to what one would expect from a range of devices, the lowest 'score' being comparable to a mobile phone's speaker, then net book speakers, all the way to Bose Surround Sound Home theatres. The least I expected was something marginally better than typical netbook speakers. I'd compare the quality over a range of audio files to that of a mid-range notebook. This is not particularly outstanding, but satisfactory. Audio output from the headphone jack was full quality 24-bit stereo sound, which is also good.
The iPad lacks a USB drive to connect peripheral devices directly. Many have found this disappointing, especially those that consider this to be a tablet PC. Allowing USB devices to be directly connected to the iPad will effectively make it a standalone device that replaces the notebook. Apple have been very careful to place this product in a new segment that does not cannibalise Mac sales by replacing them. It is designed to COMPLIMENT your PC, not replace it. This is critical, not only to Apple's marketing, but to the success of the device. Making a notebook this small with the burden of installing a range of drivers to operate a range of peripherals is irrelevant to its purpose as a media consumption device, strips a lot of its intrinsic advantages and scales up costs exponentially to make it impractical as a mainstream device. If a MacBook Air costs £1000 how much will it cost if you shrunk it to the size of an iPad? Will you still have 10 hours of battery life? What apple have done here is to have the standard port double as an SD card reader and output for connecting to external TVs. What many would like to see here is HDMI connectivity for an external monitor or TV.
Also missing is a webcam for iChat and Skype. Many will accuse Apple of holding back on features to allow modest improvements every year. All we can do is speculate about motives and the economist in me has a few ideas about these. However I will focus on how this affects the iPad's bid to be the ultimate media consumption device. A webcam is something I like to see in devices, but I seldom use it. I have never made a video call and perhaps only ever had a dozen odd video chats. Despite the availability of this function on a multitude of devices, it is seldom used. The rule at apple is: don't bother doing something unless you can do it really well and better than anyone else. That iChat is coming on the iPhone HD ( to be unveiled on June 7) is an indication that Apple may have figured out what's wrong with webcams and how to make them useful. This makes me wonder even more why it's been left out of the iPad. If whatever innovation Apple comes up with regarding iChat is a success, this will be a blow to the first generation iPad as the ultimate media consumption device.
Under the hood, the iPad is driven by Apple's custom chip, the A4. This integrates a low power 1 GHz processor with 256 MB of RAM. The specification looks underwhelming but belies the incredible responsiveness of the device. Apps open quickly. Webpages load faster than my formidable custom-built Windows 7-based Home Theatre PC. Netbooks are incredibly slow, compared to the iPad at doing anything that the iPad does. It takes 12 seconds from the moment you touch the power button to shutdown the iPad and 23 seconds to start it from a complete shutdown. Of course you never really have to shutdown the iPad.
The iPad has a solid state drive (flash) of 16, 32, or 64 GB. These can hold a fair bit of media at any given point. Considering that you sync the iPad through iTunes on a computer that holds all your media, this is more than sufficient storage. I believe the 32 GB models are ideal. Typical media libraries are about 7-10 GB, so 16 GB will be stretching it, if you load a couple of H.264 encoded movies at 1.8 GB each.
The iPad comes with a 25 Watt-hour lithium polymer battery that provides more than 10 hours of regular use, watching movies, browsing the Internet, listening to music and viewing pictures. This holds out nicely compared to laptops and mobile phones. Some of the best netbooks hold about 7 hours of a battery at best (excluding heavy broadband usage). Unlike the iPhone and iPod however, the iPad cannot be charged on a computer with a USB cable while it is on. A computer's USB port can only provide enough power to run the iPad, not charge it at the same time. You need to charge it with its charger.
The iPad is completely quiet. There are absolutely no moving parts, no fans to cool processors. Because it uses solid state drives, there's no risk of damaging the drive from a short fall. Moving parts are the main reason computers break in 3 or so years, along with diminishing battery life and power damage. The overall impression about the build is that it is a solid, rugged and durable device that can take a fair bit of wear and tear without falling apart. For this reason, I suspect the only reason one might find to replace an iPad is to get a new one with new features. The quietness of the device makes it a joy to use. I find using my PC at night stressful because of the noise of the 'quiet' fan. Watching a movie at night on a PC can really damage the quality of sleep one gets.
The iPad runs the iPhone OS 3.2. It is instantly familiar to anyone that has used an iPod touch or iPhone. The home button brings you to the main screen. At the bottom of the screen is a tray that holds 4 apps. The remaining apps are displayed as buttons arranged in a 4x5 or 5x4 array per page, depending on the orientation. The background can be customised, unlike in the current iPhone. Most of the gestures on the iPhone also apply to the iPad. Many of the core apps such as Calendar, Notes, Contacts, Maps, Video, Youtube, iTunes, App Store, Settings, Safari, Mail, iPod and Photos have been included, but all redesigned to make full use of the specifications to produce apps that are much, much better and more functional than what you'd find on the iPhone/iPod touch. Some of the apps will be reviewed further vis-a-vis their success at attempting to make the iPad the ultimate media consumption device.
iPad: The Personal Media Consumption Device.
As mentioned earlier, the iPad sets out to do a number of things better than notebooks and smartphones: browsing, email, video, maps, photos, music, reading and document manipulation on-the-go.
Browsing:
The safari browser needs no introduction. The large screen allows entire webpages to be clearly visible at once. It combines the clarity of the view of a laptop screen with the joy of using touch. The ability to manipulate pages intuitively with the fingers gives a great user experience. I'm tempted to say its a much better browsing experience than a notebook (definitely better than a smartphone) but..... Flash! The first website I visited was BBC iPlayer. The second was
http://www.NBA.com to check on the scores of the Lakers/Phoenix result. Disappointingly, I couldn't see the scores immediately because the band at the top of the page that displays scores is flash-based. I went on to download an app called SportsTap to track the game. Apple's long-running battle with Adobe over flash is well-publicised, with rather interesting exchanges between both camps. There's an African proverb that says when two elephants fight, the ground suffers. This is true in this case. Users of the iPhone and even more so, the iPad, will attest to this.
It appears Apple is finally gaining the upper hand at killing flash. They've pushed for the adoption of the infant HTML 5 protocols that allow h.264 videos to be directly embedded in websites without the use of flash. Organisations that take their web presence seriously are moving towards compliance. The BBC iPlayer used to be flash based, and out of the reach of iPhone users. Now, BBC has launched a beta site that is fully accessible on the iPad and everyone is playing catch up, not to miss out on the huge market of iPad users, which could top 10 million by Christmas. But we must not lose track of what is important here. The question here is if the iPad is the best browsing experience. The day the flash problem is history, it will be. Until, then, I'm afraid the iPad has not achieved this objective.
contd....
