So, I've been in San Francisco apartment-hunting for the past
couple of days (I found a place!), and the only computers I brought with
me are my iPad and my iPhone. It occurred to me that this might be a
useful basis for a review, so enjoy. As a reminder, I have the 64GB
model with 3G and WiFi.
In brief, I am extremely satisfied. I have been using the iPad to browse
Craigslist, listen to music, keep up with my e-mail (including a
community-l thread that made me long for the upcoming threaded mail
view), and so on. It has excelled at all of these tasks, and done so
with battery performance that continues to amaze me.
Web browsing is, of course, the iPad's forte. I've tried both
craigsphone and CraigsFish for the iPad, and they are both inferior
experiences to just using craigslist in the browser. That is because it
is awesome in the browser. Speedy to load (a big plus on AT&T in SF),
and easy to interact with via touch. It occurs to me that I could have
used Prowl to push phone numbers to my iPhone, but I didn't think of
that at the time. I really need bidirectional clipboard sharing between
iDevices...
Music and other media consumption is also a pleasure on the iPad. Simply
having 64G of space means that I can take all of my AAC music (lots is
still in FLAC only, but whatever), some TV, and still have lots of space
left. Sound quality isn't great, but it is good enough for these
purposes. I had crappy headphones all week anyhow.
E-mail is just okay. The client is good for viewing (except for the
aforementioned lack of threading, which is coming in 4.0), and only okay
for sending. I really want a way to save emails created in other apps
(i.e., PaperDesk) as drafts and edit them from the real app. Good enough
to be passable, but plenty of room for improvement.
Navigation was an unexpected benefit. The muni information in Google
Maps is decent, and Maps in general is much easier to use on the big
screen than on the iPhone. No iBART for iPad yet, but BART is simple
enough to not really need it.
Blogging is problematic. I've composed most of this post on the iPad (in
my hotel room, actually), but can't post it as I want it from here
because I can't add any pictures. The web interface has no way to upload
from the iPad's photo library, and the native client is super-crashy. I
guess I'll have to add the pictures from another computer, later.
However, actually entering text is pretty great. I've gotten quite fast
at typing on the landscape keyboard with the iPad on my lap or a table.
I can thumb-type pretty well in portrait mode, and am working to get
better. Some of the auto corrects are weird, though. It corrects "ive"
to "vie" instead of "I've" unless it's the first word in a sentence, and
that seems like a much less likely correction. It also misses some
fat-fingers that it should be able to get by key proximity (for example,
"grt" instead of "get"). However, it's definitely good enough to write a
few hundred words on.
What else...? 3G is awesome. I have had dropped calls on my iPhone in
SF, but have had great data access everywhere on my iPad. It's only
about 600k/s, but fast enough for craigslist and IM. Oh, also, the
official AIM app has been super nice. There's really nothing like being
able to IM with a good friend while waiting for a real estate agent who
is running late for a showing. I know that Beejive and IM+ are
supposedly quite good, but I kind of like the official AIM app more.
shrug.
San Francisco has been quite a nice city to use it in. I have felt safe
using it pretty much everywhere I have been, including on the bus. And
people ask about it pretty much everywhere. I think I convinced a woman
in the Starbucks on Powell and Sutter to get one. I don't count myself
as much of an Apple Fanboy (I like their products objectively, dammit),
but I think I did some good iPad evangelization.
So, that's my review. As you might have expected, I'm pretty happy with
it. Feel free to leave comments (or tweet @Roguelazer) with questions or
thoughts.
