iPad, nay iPads

It's almost hard to believe that the iPad has finally reached our shores. Friday was a pretty exciting day in the office for those of us that either had a device ordered or planned to try their luck at the store. I eagerly checked the mail room for deliveries several times that morning before giving up to head out for a run. In fact while jogging through the luscious pathways of the botanical gardens I happened to glance at my phone nonchalantly, before sprinting the rest of the way back to the office at Queen Street. My delivery you see, had come.

Having had a few days to play with it my conclusions are unsurprisingly positive. The device is uncompromisingly attractive to the eye and unfortunately, fingerprints. I had the good fortune to play with one beforehand so the heft of the machine, due no doubt to the two oversized batteries, wasn't all that shocking. You do eventually learn how to hold it and distribute the weight of the screen with efficiency. Battery life by all accounts is absolutely amazing. I've hardly put the thing down and have used it for well over five hour stints at a time between brief charges and the battery indicator hasn't fallen below 56%.

The first thing that you notice after turning it on is how vibrant the screen is. It's marvelous to play games, read books and enjoy photos with other people as the viewing angle remarkably wide. I have no problem leaving it flat on the table to read something free handed, something I would not be able to do with the screen of the iPhone.

Applications of course are the real draw of the iPad. I've been doing a fair bit of research into the standout apps and loaded them up beforehand.

Evernote - I couldn't live without this at work. I'm even composing this post in it
iBooks - there's not much choice in the iBook store at the moment but it's ok with ePub support
Comiczeal - a great app for reading comics in cbz/cbr format is made infinitely better by removing the need to scroll to see the whole page
Numbers - I'm a bit of an Excel geek so I need my spreadsheets. Was a little disappointed that they didn't have pivot tables but the function list isn't too bad overall
Wired magazine - more of a gimmick and a tech demo but it's interesting to see where the publications may go in the future
Instapaper - brilliant for taking long articles out to read. Especially as I don't have the 3G version of the iPad

Typing on the full sized onscreen keyboard in landscape has been an interesting experience. It's certainly large enough that you expect to be able to use your normal touch typing skills, but the lack of physical keys means that you have to be a lot more cautious about accidental touches, not an easy thing when one is used to resting fingers on the home row of the keyboard. The layout is also certainly different from a traditional keyboard so that is taking some getting used to as well. I'd almost liken it to using a mechanical typewriter, where the timing the release of a key before typing the next letter is crucial to maintaining a consistent tempo and speed. The auto correction in iPhone OS is pretty useful once you start trusting it again.

I've been showing the new toy to everyone that exhibited the mildest note of interest so Alison has had to listen to me parrot on non-stop all weekend. She's had little opportunity to actually use it but had grudgingly admitted that she was impressed and could see herself getting one in the future. Since I knew we were going to be in Chermside to check out the Apple store, I decided to strike while the iron was hot. This would be the only way I could guarantee that my iPad remained solely for my use.



I also picked up a wireless bluetooth keyboard just incase I need to type longer reports, though in truth I really want to give the virtual one a good go first. Now that we've been a little indulgent and splurged for an iPad each I doubt we'll be using the laptop for much aside from downloading files and work. Still early though so it should be interesting to see how our habits change over time. All in all definitely no regrets.

Although, it would be nice to be able to watch Masterchef on the iPad which can't be done as it doesn't support Flash video. In saying that, the channel Ten website has been crap lately with streaming video so it makes little difference in the end. Story for another time perhaps.