After a Weekend with My IPad: A Review

On Saturday morning, I joined the crowds and purchased an iPad. After a weekend of using it, I feel that a realistic review is possible.

A few weeks back when pre-ordering became available, I decided to reserve a 16 GB wifi iPad in-store instead of actually pre-ordering. The was a lot of thinking that went into this (really there was), but since this is just a review I'd like to stay in subject. We can save the 16/32/64 GB and wifi/3G conversation for another day.

I arrived at the Apple Store at South Coast Plaza around 8:30 on Saturday morning. When I arrived, there were around 150-200 people in both the reservations line and in the non-reservations line. I took my place at the back of the reservations line, and the friendly Apple folks checked me in on their iPhone.

Amusingly, a guy behind me had already been checked in...turned out he had tweeted that he was going to pick up his iPad at the South Coast store, and someone got there before him and stole his name. As I found throughout the morning, that Apple employes were very helpful and accommodating. They let the guy check in, and had a good laugh about it, as apparently this wasn't the first time it had happened.

Once the store opened at 9:00, they started letting people in about 20 at a time. The process was very fast, and I had my iPad and Apple iPad case and was out of the store by 9:20.

iPad in hand, I headed to the Corner Bakery, where I knew there would be plenty of coffee and free wifi. I grab be a coffee, a chocolate croissant, and went to work.

I first opened up Safari to see how web browsing would work out. This may be the same browser that's on my iPhone, but it sure is a different experience. Having this much screen real estate to view and interact with websites really is a whole new experience. I visited many of my normal haunts, and found Safari to be highly responsive and fast to load just about anything.

None of the sites that I normally visit use Flash for anything except perhaps a few ads or non-essential items, so the lack of Flash does not bother me at all. In fact, I would argue that if the iPad gets adopted the way Apple hopes it will, that it will drive the adoption of HTML 5 and CSS 3 very quickly. Here's hoping that Flash goes away sooner rather than later.

After furnishing up with Safari, I jumped into the App Store and started spending gift cards. I bought just a few apps to start out. Being Saturday morning, I felt that some leisure was in order, so I started with Words With Friends. If you're not yet addicted to this game, the iPad version - Words With Friends HD - will certainly do it. The game is fun on the iPhone, but it's even better on the iPad. Having such a large screen to view the board on makes game play just that much better.

Next I thought I should try out something productive, and purchased SketchBook Pro. For $8, it's an amazing graphic editing app. With support for most of the tools that I use in Photoshop (and yes, I'm a very minimal user), it's the perfect drawing app for me. To have this much touch screen space to draw on is just awesome. Personally, I think it's even better than a pen tablet fir drawing. Turns out I'm much better at drawing and writing with my fingers than with a pen. Say what you will about that.

While we're talking about drawing apps, Adobe's free Ideas app is really great. I should make it clear that I don't hate Adobe, just Flash, and I'm happy to see them supporting the iPad despite whatever other tensions may exist.

After a weekend together, I feel that the iPad really will replace my MacBook Pro (my main computer) as the system that I use when I'm nit at my desk. My laptop can now become essentially a desktop machine that I bring with me when I travel for work, but besides that it's going to stay in my desk. This is exactly what I was hoeing for, and I'm happy that it's going to work out that way.

Oh, and did I mention that I wrote this whole review on my iPad? This thing is awesome.