April 16, 2010

My Hands-On iPad Experience

Filed under: Main — admin @ 12:01 am


I finally got to play with an iPad, and it makes me so glad that I didn’t buy one!

My local Best Buy doesn’t have an Apple center, but recently I happened upon a Best Buy in another town and, lo, they had a swath of iPads out for people to play with.

There were lots of folks there who were playing with the iPad. No one bought one. I don’t blame them.

The first thing I learned about the iPad in person that I’d never guess from seeing one online is that it’s way too small. For some reason, I assumed that the iPad was about the size of a sheet of paper, about 8-by-11 inches. Or at least the screen was about as big as my ThinkPad’s screen, just under 11 inches.

Wrong!

The iPad is doinky. In fact, if Apple came out with a larger iPad, I might be interested . Yet, my hopes were dashed when I just read that Apple is coming out with an even smaller iPad in the future.

Another iPad reality that I’m reading about is what I call the post-product introduction Chorus of Disappointment. It’s a tradition for any early adopter of Apple’s stuff.

I paid $600 for my original iPhone. I wanted the phone, so I was willing to part with the money, but that was way, way too much. Plus the original iPhone had no third party software, no video capture, plus a lot of missing features. So despite my excitement and need, I was disappointed in the first iPhone.

Apparently the early adopters for the iPad are having trouble accessing Wi-Fi networks. Also, the hoops and hurdles you must clear to get files transferred between your main computer and the iPad are an impediment. That leads me to my ultimate iPad complaint:

The iPad is not a computer. It’s not even half a laptop. Sure, it was fun to play with while I was in Best Buy, but that was about it. I really couldn’t see myself walking home with one or even finding a purpose for the thing. But at least I could say that I did get a change to play with one.

10 Comments

  1. I see that there is talk of a Google (Android) iPad, plus the WePad I wrote about in a Wambooli link. Obviously based on the tremendous sales of the iPad, this tablet quasi-computer category might be around a while.

    Comment by admin — April 16, 2010 @ 5:49 am

  2. That link you posted about a smaller iPad is only available to paid customers of whatever news company that is.

    Hey, I entered Will It Blend’s contest to win a 32GB iPad. I enter only because it was free. I generally don’t like new Apple stuff but I figured “It’s free so why not”. If I win, I’ll have something to brag about. If not, then I can go back to life normally.

    Comment by linuxlove — April 16, 2010 @ 6:10 am

  3. I hope the iPad you win doesn’t bore you to death. 🙂

    Comment by admin — April 16, 2010 @ 6:45 am

  4. When I first heard about the iPad my mind immediately screamed “IT’S CRAP!!”. The main reason being that it doesn’t support flash, and that its sooooooo flimsy and easy to break its not even right. The fact that Steve Jobs is trying to kill Flash is disappointing. It may be a little slow, but its not too buggy and definitely is not going away in the near (or even distant future). All Stevey is going to do by not supporting Flash is make people mad. Not that browsing the web on it is that great anyway…

    Comment by gamerguy473 — April 16, 2010 @ 7:50 am

  5. I’m not sure Jobs is trying to kill Flash. My hope is that he motivates Adobe to clean up Flash and make it a more solid platform. Then again, HTML5 may do in Flash anyway.

    Comment by admin — April 16, 2010 @ 9:40 am

  6. Oddly enough, more competition seems to be making things worse for customers: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6344MS20100405.

    Basically, the book publishers now dictate the prices – while Amazon originally dictated the prices and chose to go lower (if only to increase Kindle adoption) than the publishers would normally ask. Sometimes capitalism is weird.

    Comment by sriksrid — April 16, 2010 @ 5:46 pm

  7. I’ll give you that. HTML5 has alot on flash and has the potential to do away with Flash altogether. Looking at the new API’s that it has, I’m pretty impressed. They new features in HTML5 are all the things Flash had that HTML didn’t. But I’d still hate to see the Flash platform go away all together. That would make Flash Professional good for nothing more than making cute little movies.

    Comment by gamerguy473 — April 17, 2010 @ 7:54 am

  8. I tried picking up Flash last year. Bought a horrible book and went through it. Did some projects for a few web sites. Didn’t really find anything long-term to do, though had I the time I probably would have done some game or something in Flash. It’s not evil, but it does crash my Mac a lot.

    Comment by admin — April 17, 2010 @ 7:57 am

  9. Weird. Flash never crashes any of my PCs, but it does crash my old G3 a lot.

    Comment by linuxlove — April 18, 2010 @ 5:29 am

  10. Yeah, there’s something about Macs and really old PC’s that just throw up whenever Flash comes around. I have no idea why.

    Comment by gamerguy473 — April 18, 2010 @ 6:06 am

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