Marco.org

I’m : a programmer, writer, podcaster, geek, and coffee enthusiast.

Disorganized iPad impressions

I love it.

My iPhone now feels like a tiny, cramped iPad.

I’m impressed with the quality of the first wave of apps, especially the games.

3 million iPads sold in 2010 is too low of an estimate.

I can type more quickly than I thought when I set it in my lap in landscape mode. I even comfortably wrote this blog post on it in the back seat of a car.

The iPad lends itself to gathering around a table and playing multiplayer games or using collaborative apps. Flight Control HD is a lot of fun when you have assistance.

Safari is great, especially since, unlike the iPhone, the screen is large enough to avoid the need for special “mobile” layouts. I love browsing Tumblr’s regular Dashboard with it.

I use landscape orientation a lot more than I do on the iPhone, partially because…

I don’t like that the split-view interface structure (Mail, Notes) makes the left/”master” pane available only in a popover in portrait orientation. Having such frequently accessed functionality hidden in a popover feels like a bad hack and requires a lot of excess tapping, and I find that I dislike using these applications in portrait because of it. (I used this split-view structure in Instapaper, but my popover/left/”master” view only contains the folder list, which is rarely accessed.)

I’m not crazy about the black Apple case. Its rubber exterior makes it difficult to slide next to anything else in a bag, the flap near the center spine is awkward, and it’s difficult to remove the iPad from it. For the first time ever for an electronic device, I think I may want a sleeve.

Not having its own cellular data connectivity has already been inconvenient a few times. I’m going the Verizon MiFi route, but only because I’m in New York where AT&T’s data service is barely usable, and I occasionally tether a laptop. If you live somewhere with good AT&T service and don’t need tethering, you should seriously consider the 3G-equipped iPad.

A Verizon iPad would be a dream, but there’s no chance they’d ever offer the pricing and flexibility that AT&T gave Apple for this.

The screen’s viewing angle and color reproduction are excellent, and is more vivid than nearly every LCD I’ve ever seen except the high-end iMac panels.

It’s always covered in fingerprints. This drives me nuts. My preferred anti-glare film, Power Support’s, isn’t yet available for the iPad, and I’m not sure it would be practical on a screen this size anyway.

The glass screen’s reflectivity is occasionally a problem. Applications with dark backgrounds, including Instapaper’s dark mode, are unusable except in very low light. The reflections are less noticeable when running bright applications.

The speaker is impressively loud, especially when the iPad is resting flat on a table. It sounds better and louder than the built-in speakers in every 13” Apple laptop, but not quite as good as the 15” MacBook Pro’s.

After briefly trying some, I’m not using any pixel-doubled iPhone apps. I’m going iPad-native or nothing. I suspect that a lot of people will make the same choice, so I strongly advise that developers get iPad-native apps out as quickly as possible (although I recognize that you don’t need me to tell you that). It’s a wide-open land grab right now.

There are a lot of gaps in the app lineup for great developers to fill.

This is a big deal.