iPad Launch Day
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I made my way to an Apple Store on Saturday, and did not come home with an iPad. And it wasn't because they didn't have them in stock. Rather, when I got there at 3pm, they were displaying several "stacks" of them behind the Genius Bar. And, I couldn't find an employee who would even discuss how many the store received, how many they sold, or even how many reserved iPads weren't picked up before the 3pm cutoff. So, for all I knew, they had stacks of them in the back storage room. Employees were easy to spot: they wore blue shirts advertising the iPad with this slogan, taken from Apple's web page: "A magical and revolutionary product at an unbelievable price."
By 3pm, the line was only a memory. But the store was full of people using the iPad, and indeed, there were happy customers leaving with new iPads. This store had 28 units on display for customers and potential customers to play with. And, for the time I was there (over an hour), each of them was being fully used. The staff was friendly and knowledgeable.
I used nearly every feature available on the iPad, from configuration settings to the pre-installed applications. The Apple apps and the full screen apps demonstrate why the iPad is so much more than a glorified iPod Touch or iPhone. Keynote looked amazing. Pages was set up to let you move images around and watch the text flow. It was just as fast as advertised. Numbers will take some getting used to; I don't see it being used for big, hairy spreadsheets given the screen size. But the presentation did look as nice as the iWork version. Other full size apps I played with include the new MLB (baseball) app, which was really nice since games were "in play" during the afternoon as I was using it. The eTrade app demonstrated how nice it is to have lots of data on the screen at once; vs. swapping between smaller iPhone screens. Reuters News app also looked nice.
I didn't spend much time surfing YouTube or looking for Flash content, so the lack of Flash never got in my way.
I didn't have any reason to try to do two things at once, so the lack of multi-tasking never bothered me. Of course, I did have the iPod play music in the background as I did other tasks. It works just like the iPhone in this regard.
The model I used was a 16gig model. In the stats page, it showed 14gig available total, and they had 5 gig of content installed. This included the apps, 250+ songs, and 800+ photos. The photo display was stunning. Smooth and fast. Just as advertised.
Two disappointments for me: 1) the new New York Times app was not installed, so there was no way to interact with the fancy new program that Steve tempted us with back in January. 2) The (Google) Maps app couldn't connect to the server. The Apple employee I spoke with acknowledged this, and even tried switching wi-fi networks for me. It still didn't work. However, the app had cached versions of the Eifel Tower, so I could pretend I was Steve during his demo and pan in and out on the satellite view. It worked just as fast for me as it did for him. But it would have been so much cooler to test it on my home address and see if it was still as snappy... I'm grumpy, but not cynical, so I won't try to assign blame for the unavailable server.
Overall, it was a fun product to use. It worked as advertised, nothing more and nothing less. I think Apple delivered exactly what they promised. And, by having over 2,000 new iPad apps ready to sell in the iTunes store, they've got enough content for new owners to begin enjoying their new purchase. Why didn't I buy one? Because I have an iPhone and a MacBook already, and there isn't yet a compelling app or collection of apps I can't live without on the iPad. $500 for a book reader is too much for me. $500 to have a fancy view of MLB games is too much for me. I have the iWork family pack on the laptop and desktop already. But, I envision a future when there are over a dozen nice apps I'd use over the course of a week, plus nation-wide newspapers, magazines, and catalogs available on the iPad. Then the device will start to have some appeal for me. It's at version one and less than a day old! Give it time, I think it's going to be around for a while. Not to mention what good competition in the marketplace will do to make it better.