Munchkin-wg.de

So I bought the iPad last Saturday, and had ample time to fool around with it. Yes, I know, much better writers than myself with much more credibility have written loads of reviews. But whatm do I care. Maybe somebody will like value my opinion nonetheless.

Let’s start with the conclusion : MEH

The device looks awesome, feels good in your hand, but you really don’t know how, when and where to hold it. It’s too thin to be able to grip it well with one hand (you always have your finger on the screen at that point) and too big to work it with one hand anyway.
The CPU is blazing fast, web browsing is nearly as nice as on a computer and the speakers rock. We’ve been using it as an impromptu stereo the last days.
Oh and the battery? It lasts seemingly forever. Having used it at least 10 hours in the past three days, r battery only just died. So besides missing a good grip point, there are only positive tongs to be said about the hardware.
However, the software sucks. We all know iPhone OS. It’s pretty much the same thing on the iPad. Yes, some added UI functions, but it still feels like a lot went wasted. My biggest points are flash and multitasking.
My first thought was : hey, great, now I can just use the iPad to watch some movies before I sleep. Well, so much for that. Neither Hulu nor southpark studios support the HTML5, so no video there. However, once you found a video (for example with the ABC app), the viewing is awesome.
For multitasking, chatting sucks. With all that screen real estate, you don’t want to be using the full screen with a stupid chat window. It’d rather just have 15% occupied with a chat window. That’s the only time I really need multitasking,but it’s a pretty important use case to me.
Let me quickly go throughout the other use cases I’ve fooled around with:

- emails: if you have a table to lay e iPad on, it’s perfect for writing even longer emails. The client seems to be a bit nicer than the iPhones in the navigation, but otherwise nearly completely the same. No big news here.
- pictures : the iPad is the perfect picture viewer. Swipe through your pictures, zoom in and out seamlessly and all at on a screen about as big as a normal picture printout. Perfect for this!
- reading : looking the rotation is very useful here. It doesn’t beat the kindle in usability ( you always touch the screen somewhere and skip a page by accident) but other than that, it’s pretty useable. Still prefer a real book (which I don’t to a kindle)

Other than that, it seems that the apps are a lot more expensive than for the iPhone. And the iPhone emulation is a joke. IF you zoom the app, it’s not interpolated ( ie looks horrible) and if you don’t, you are wasting 60% screen. Oh, and can somebody give me an explanation why the iPhone onscreen keyboard is used instead of the iPad one?

Well, so much for my long first impression

Patrick

PS this was written on the iPad, so yeah, the keyboard is pretty darn good.