Living with iPad – Part I: First Night

So i caved. I tried to hold out for as long as I could for various reasons, but I just couldn’t do it anymore and bought an iPad. Why? The biggest justification came from a suggestion that I could use it for showing off my portfolio to clients and in interviews, then the new commercial came out. The first commercial was sort of boring with very average looking people reading the New York Times and checking e-mail, but the new one….

GARDENING!

All that playing over the Yeah Yeah Yeahs? Now there’s a device my inner hipster can get excited about!

I think the point that the new ad is selling is that the iPad is a device you live with and because of that, I am separating my review of the iPad into several posts about living with the device.

The experience of playing with an iPad in a store and using it at home is radically different, but first I have to say that from out of the box to use takes some time. Before an iPad can be turned on, it must be synced to a computer and depending on how many files you have, it can take some time. What this also means, is that if you planned on getting an iPad for your less computer savvy relatives as a computer replacement (a task I think it is more than capable of), you need to at least hook it up to a computer once. After that, they can buy as much music, movies, and apps as they want, even load photos on to it and word process on it without ever needing a pc.

So on to first impressions. The first hour with my iPad, i spent loading up apps and seeing which of my old iPhone ones would work in full screen iPad mode. As you have probably heard, the iPad runs the same operating system as the iPhone and therefore runs all the iPhone apps(hence my biggest pet peeve at the moment, people saying “it’s just a giant iPhone”). I immediately noticed that the iPhone apps blown up 2x just seen odd and unfitting on the iPad.

However, the actual iPad apps, this is where the whole “just a big iPhone” debate falls completely apart. Sitting in a lap, the iPad’s screen is absolutely giant compared to the iPhone and this added real-estate makes for a comfortable reading experience. So far, I have basically done nothing but read on the iPad. Twitter, USA Today, BBC news, Facebook, New York Times. People have thrown around the “it just works” phrase a lot with apple products, but I would take the iPad another step. In my first few hours of using it, it is like it fools my brain into thinking it is a book, a magazine, a newspaper. Whatever the iPad wants to become, I just instantly seem to adjust to it and the device itself just disappears. That is the highest form of design.

I had two moments where I felt everything just click, the first was when I downloaded Twitterific. I wasn’t a fan of their desktop and iPhone app, but with the iPad they seem to have got it right. It is just a beautifully designed app and makes bird noises! After trying twitter.com and tweetdeck, I decided Twitterific was vastly more legible and in twitter app, that is paramount. While laying on my couch and watching tv, I was reading and sending replies at a speed I have never ever done, even on a desktop. I also noticed that all the fatigue of reading twitter on my iPhone was gone because of the bigger type. This is the device twitter was designed for.

The second perfect moment was when my parents asked to see the pictures I took at my brother’s graduation last weekend. Since I was already using it, I had them sit on either side of me on the couch and showed them on the iPad. The screen is so vibrant that high resolution photos look better than paper on it and that is true at nearly every angle except from behind the screen of course. Once they saw that swiping move back and forth and pinching was zoom, my parents hands were all over the thing. All three of us were interacting with the photos on the same device seamlessly. That is something that couldn’t happen on a phone or a computer, period.

I didn’t go back to my iMac all day and night, until right now to write this post (half of it was written on the WordPress iPad app, but I needed to take the screenshots above). I think that says volumes on just how powerful the iPad really is. At my desk, I realized I didn’t have a dock for my new purchase, but with a little duct-tape, an IKEA pencil, and a Staples metal business card holder… I made a perfectly usable iPad dock.  One last discovery is the iPad becomes a digital picture frame while it is docked and locked on a desk, which makes the Business Card/IKEA/Business-card Holder Dock even more handy.

There will be more to come, as I think I am only cracking the surface of how this device is going to change how I live.