Well I did it. And I did it before the device was even available in Canada where I live. I was in Texas for a while so I decided to bite the bullet while there and try to get an iPad. Several phone calls in different cities found that the Apple Store at The Domain in Austin had 32gb and 64gb units in stock. Since Austin was my last stop before home, and with the help of Austin based co-worker, the inestimable Jim Rileyy, I was able to get in and get out of the store in under 10 minutes and get to the airport in time to get squished into a United seat strategically placed so I could be kicked in the back for three hours to Chicago by a screaming capuchin monkey dressed like a small child.

Ok, you don’t care about that, and I don’t blame you. Suffice to say that instead of charging me twice for the seat as they like to do, United could charge for and make money by guaranteeing child free flights. And on to the iPad.

I was unable to connect to the iTunes Store to complete registration but fortunately Apple figured out that this could happen and I was able to start syncing the iPad with the MacBook Pro I use for business. Sync was reasonably quick and I got TV shows, and music copied over early in the flight. Putting the MacBook Pro away, I then focused on the iPad.

The screen is bright and contrasty and easy to view from multiple angles. It has the gloss finish as on the iPhone and some of the newer MacBooks but unlike the gloss screen on my MacBook Air, the iPad is very reflective and finding the right angle is something you will need to do when working with it in the presence of directional lighting. Not a flaw, more a what’s so and influenced by my personal preference for matte displays.

Despite much speculation about performance both positive and negative, the Apple A4 processor is very fast and even while being really snappy (effectively making my iPhone 3G look like its permanently doing the quaalude shuffle) it’s easy on the battery. I watched two episodes of Fringe, listened to a couple of podcasts and on the leg to Toronto watched an episode of Castle and on landing or more accurately “put all your useful distractions away” time, battery level was still at 89%. By contrast, the MacBook Pro would be on fumes after 2.5 hours and the Air would be legs up like a raccoon on the side of the road in under 2 hours. This is the first time where I think I will be able to travel for an entire day and be able to use my stuff without having to hunt for AC power until that night.

Given the time between the purchase and boarding, I did not add any applications, and I was under the impression that the AppStore where my account is (Canada) did not have any iPad apps available since the device is still not available here in retail stores at the time of this writing. The built in apps are awesome. The calendar is extremely usable and a much richer experience than on the iPhone or iPod Touch. I did wire syncing initially waiting to activate over the air MobileMe sync until later (more on that below). The Address book is similarly rich in interface and usability. The Photo viewer is excellent and produces great images. I’ve used Safari a lot since getting home and it’s a much more mac experience than the iPhone, although I have noticed the lack of Flash support much more than I have on the iPhone, which confirms that I am using the device for the web more than my mobile options. iTunes is, well it’s iTunes. No rocket science to use that. The only minor niggle is that I did a lot of work to ensure I had good cover art for all my music but when it’s blown up to display on the iPad, I see I will need to go back to CoverScout and do some significant updates.

On the subject of audio, I connected my Motorola S9-HD bluetooth headphones to the iPad. Setting up the Bluetooth was simple enough once I unpaired the headphones from the iPhone. I have a love/hate relationship with these things as they sound great but cutout a fair bit and can only be paired with a single device at a time. If regular bluetooth earphones can be paired with multiple devices, these should too, but that’s a Motorola issue not the iPad. The iPad supports the A2DP standard but doesn’t handle the full range of bluetooth commands, just like the iPhone and 3rd gen iPod Touch.

I am underwhelmed by Mail for iPad, or at least halfway. In portrait mode, Mail follows what appears to be a design standard with dropdowns in the left margin edge to ease thumb scrolling. But the only way to switch messages is to pop up the menu and tap around to see other messages or other accounts. I’m looking forward to the consolidated inbox promised this fall in iPad OS 4. I know Steve jobs referred to the coming OS as iPhone OS 4, I will refer to it as iPad OS 4 as it comes later than the version for the phone and I promise you it’s not the same OS. Back to Mail. Rotate the device 90 degrees to landscape mode and Mail becomes much more usable with a split window view, more like on a Mac. I don’t like Mail in Portrait mode, it’s unpleasant to use and hope for a change soon. Landscape mode is fine though.

Watching TV or Movies is incredibly easy, just like in iTunes. Display is super sharp and showed no artifacts even with fast movement on the screen. Audio through the headphone jack is quite good, even with the ZAGG earbuds I was using since I ran down the battery on the Bose QuietComfort 15s I usually try to use on flights over an hour. This morning I was surprised when Night Stand woke me up using it’s alarm function by playing a song selected from iTunes. I did not expect much from the built-in speakers and I am pleasantly surprised. I still think that headphones are better for personal listening, but it’s quite nice that they aren’t mandatory so long as you are in a place where the speakers aren’t going to cause you grief with other people or ambient noise. If you were expecting the kind of sound that you get out of the iPhone internal speakers, you’re going to be pleasantly surprised. Good high end and strong mids, bass not so strong but there’s no 15″ sub hidden in this thing anywhere.

I was unable to get the Apple sleeve for the iPad but friend Ross Brunson strongly recommends it. I will have to wait until it’s available through the Canada Apple Store. The Tekzilla crew felt it was overpriced compared to the less expensive and excellent leather cover for the Amazon Kindle II. The point is, you’re going to want a case/cover of some kind. Preferably with a prop up feature because after a while, nearly a kilogram gets heavy. I also find the polished aluminum back hard to keep a grip on without feeling like I’m holding the iPad too hard. I plan on ordering one the excellent Zagg Invisible Shield products. I have them on both Mac laptops and used to have one on my iPhone until I discovered that however thin it is, once on, it made getting the iPhone in and out of the Mophie Juicepak Air a real pain. However, the Invisible Shield while completely smooth if much easier to hold onto than the direct polished aluminum and glass.

I did get the VGA adapter and the dock (sans keyboard). The VGA adapter works with videos and with the Keynote application. The second function is what I bought it for, but Keynote is not yet available for purchase here yet, so I cannot advise how it works. Ross tells me that it works beautifully. I went for the dock without the keyboard because I felt the one piece unit might be overly constraining so instead I use the Apple Wireless Keyboard that I’ve had for a while. The bluetooth connection is as simple as it should be and it works very well.

I must admit that I am surprised by the usability of the onscreen keyboard. I expected that the touch with no feedback would be less usable than it turns out to be. Using Twitterific to post tweets is simple and I didn’t end up with a lot of typos. In landscape mode the keyboard spreads out and you can use more of your traditional typing skills. It’s not a thumb typing thing like the Blackberry or to a lesser extent the iPhone, but you can get decent throughput once you acclimatize to the layout. Andy Ihnatko said that the onscreen keyboard is actually a bit wider than a MacBook keyboard in landscape mode, but I find that the altered key layout slows me down a bit. I would not want to try to do a lot of typing on the iPad as there is really no wrist rest and the touch typing will get tiring after a while. Plus the rounded back means the iPad doesn’t lie completely flat. For short emails, tweets, Facebook posts it’s really quite good, but don’t plan on writing your dissertation with the onscreen keyboard.

So what about apps? When I got home I connected to the US store and downloaded a couple of free apps for testing. Simple as you would hope. The next day I jacked the iPad into the Mac Pro and as expected was informed that if I wanted to connect the iPad to this computer, it needed to be wiped as it was already linked to a different computer. So I did the deed and then used iTunes to select what I wanted on the iPad. I was pleased to see that all those free apps (both of them) were retained. I then ran the Application updater in iTunes and found to my pleasure that some of my apps had been updated to be both iPhone and iPad ready. I searched for iWork on the Canada App Store, and got no results so I assumed that iPad specific apps were not available yet. I was wrong. Coworker Kevin Smith pinged me from the UK pinged me to advise that he had found iPad apps on the UK App Store so I searched for some that I knew I wanted such as the iPad version of 1Password. Happily there are a ton of iPad apps available on the Canada AppStore and I’ve already bought and installed a number of them. Note that at the time of this writing the iPad App Store app reports that it is not available in my country so for the time being I have to get the apps via iTunes.

The downside to some apps is that while many app developers are treating their paying customers to dual mode apps as a free upgrade, others are releasing iPad unique versions with the same features and functions as the iPhone versions but at up to double the purchase price of the iPhone version. I have been a big fa of Cultured Code’s Things app but seriously $20 for an app that does the same thing as the $10 version on my iPhone? Nice customer attitude folks. Not.

Now to the usability of iPhone mode apps on the iPad. In normal view they look and act like they are running on an iPhone except for the wireless network finders that all abort everytime. Apple has pulled this class of app from the AppStore and I think that they have done something in OS 3.2 to cripple them. Bad! You can click the 2x button on any iPhone mode app to have it fill the screen, and the app will work fine. Because it is actually growing the pixel count by 4x (two dimensions) the results are fuzzy and if I look at any of them too long I get a headache. Consider this a stopgap only until an iPad version of your favourite app is available, and hope you don’t have to buy the thing again. Apps are displayed the same as on the iPhone using a grid system and multiple screens. You can move App icons by holding one down until they all start to jiggle and then drag the App to the screen and location you want, just like the iPhone. I’m at about 60% iPad native now with the other 40% being apps not yet available in an iPad version, such as DropBox and GWweb that I use to get to GroupWise WebAccess. The pre-alpha of GroupWise Mobility Synchronizer that Novell made available last month works fine for calendars and contacts but email is inconsistent. Cannot complain as this is truly early access, but I do look forward to being able to use the iPad for business as well as personal email.

Apple is working hard to load the App Store and there are lots of apps to choose from already. Some feel like they were rushed out a bit. Comixology’s comic book reader, also used by Marvel displays comics wonderfully but the trick to reveal the menu bar so you can close the comic when you are done isn’t well documented. Not picking on these folks, this is just an example of the kind of thing that will improve rapidly as momentum increases. If you used the version of iPhone OS that actually allowed 3rd party apps when it was first released, this is deja vu all over again.

iBooks are neatly done, with 30,000 free books from Project Gutenberg and a fair number of books already in the iBook store. Since I already have a Kindle, and Amazon has already delivered a free iPad app, I can read anything I bought for my Kindle on the iPad. Will I dump my Kindle? Nope. The Kindle is much lighter in weight and the Whispersync is just too convenient. Sure I could have waited to get a 3G version and then paid for another data plan but I think I will keep my Kindle as it works great and gives me more agility than buying through the iBookstore.

Why not wait for the 3G version? As I travel in the US a lot but live in Canada, 3G would only drive me into roaming bankruptcy. As for at home, I think I will get a MiFi instead, solving the connectivity problem for multiple WiFi devices in one place. Maybe someday cross-border roaming won’t be so brutal. And maybe I’ll be able to eat ice cream without putting on weight.

So what don’t I like? Well that whole fingerprint resistant oleophobic coating is a load of horse pucky. My screen looks like a smudgefest and I have very dry skin. Other buyers are also hugely underwhelmed by this not functioning capability. Apple pulled screen protectors from the Apple Store a while back to convince people that they weren’t necessary because of this coating. Yup, the coating that doesn’t work. So now I have a microfiber cloth in the Incase case I bought.

I also don’t like that my MacBook Pro apparently doesn’t have enough power on its USB port to charge the iPad when it’s awake. Put the iPad to sleep and it will charge at half the normal rate

I did try to buy the USB camera connector because I use cameras that don’t use the SD Card, but that connector won’t be around until the end of April. That’s disappointing but moreso is that the ability to put files on the device looks to be pretty difficult. I’m going to buy the iPad version of AirShare and see if that gives me a workaround. Mailing stuff around is to use docs is just goofy.

In my launch review, I was concerned about the lack of cameras, and we’ve learned that there is already space made for one. Now that I have handled the device and grown fatigued holding it for long periods of time, I’m backing off on my camera griping. I have cameras on all my Macs, and I really don’t use them for video chat very much, mostly for recording videocasts. Not enough ponies in the iPad for that. But I expect V2 to have a camera to make the masses buy new ones and to piss off those who know it could have been there in V1.

I also was concerned about the use of the Micro SIM slot. Speaking to a really helpful and talented rep from Rogers last weekend (he’ll quit and get a different job soon enough – way too competent), he shared that the micro SIM is a pain in the ass since no other device they have uses them. So it probably is the big suck to AT&T that the pundits think the move is to prevent people from moving their iPhone SIM cards over. It’s still an asinine choice.

Apple has locked the filesystem up tight so adding files is much tougher than it should be, but I’m still annoyed by the lack of expandable storage, the lack of a simple USB or SD card slot and that you have to use iTunes to get most anything on or off the device. I understand the Apple constraint for simplicity mantra but this lack of flexibility is really starting to tick me off.

No stylus. I’m going to find that pogostick and try it with Autodesk’s Sketchbook app. I would really like to be able to take jot notes on this thing in meetings. Figuring that one out is still pending.

Multitasking is coming in OS 4 so I’ll leave that one alone. I bitched about other stuff and declared I wouldn’t buy a WiFi only model. Well I did and at this point think it’s the right decision. If I change my mind, someone will buy this one and I won’t take a huge bath on it.

The Result

RECOMMENDED – but you really should spend some hands-on time before dropping the dimes and nickels, and also be honest with yourself about what the iPad is and what it isn’t. It’s an amazing handheld device to watch video, look at photos, surf the web, do email and social networking, play games, use simple apps, read books and newsfeeds on a fabulous display with 10+ hour battery life. It’s not a replacement for your computer unless the only things you do and I do mean ONLY are those listed above. It may be a replacement for a cheap netbook since they are often storage bereft and have keyboards sized for the hands of a four year old, but it doesn’t compare to a MacBook or even a Windows 7 laptop. So any reviews that say it is were probably working with the other iPad – the imaginary one. The iPad is a great device, better than I expected and there is absolutely a fit between the smartphone/media player and the laptop where the iPad rules. Less than a week in, I have no regrets and really like the unit. Magical? Not really. An amazing price? Well, it’s less than a grand if that is what’s needed to be amazing. But if it fits your needs, you’re going to love the darn thing.

As an Apple customer and reasonably proficient user of Apple products, I’d been waiting with anticipation for the announcement this past week of what we now know of as the iPad. I was on the road on business, and so must send a big thank you to my buddy Paddy Hynes, who kept me up to date on the announcement from the live blogs he was watching while multitasking.

When I got back to the hotel I tried to watch the stream from Apple, blaming the hotel connection for my inability to do so and later discovering that the demand was so great, no one was getting a good stream. Testimony I suppose to the level of interest. Certainly every Apple oriented and most other tech blogs/podcasts/netdenizens made some note of the announcement as did most of the bigger print outlets.

By now we should all have the gist of the iPad. It runs the iPhone OS, allegedly a build called 3.2 and supports not only the majority of the 140K apps out there but also has a new SDK to leverage the near 10 inch display. It has multitouch and to some extent is a larger iPod Touch. While some see this as negative, the iPod Touch has been incredibly successful and has a very short learning curve. The new device when it arrives will come in six versions, two sets of three, the first group having WiFi connectivity and the second group having both WiFi and 3G connectivity. Both groups will offer 16GB, 32GB and 64GB flash memory options. The most inexpensive is $499 USD and the most expensive is $829 USD. Apple beat the estimates and have produced devices and pricing that could create a brand new category of personal interactive devices. They aren’t PDAs or Smartphones and they aren’t computers either. Some are calling the device a netbook, I don’t see that myself. The OS is too light to compare with a Moblin or Windows and the form factor makes it not a PDA. Everyone who got hands-on made note that the device is very fast, surprising considering a 1 GHz CPU given how pokey Netbooks with 1.6GHz CPUs are. It’s still at least 60 days before I’ll see one, so this post is very preliminary but here goes.

The Good Stuff

1. The unit is by all accounts fast. To have been slow, like my iPhone 3G would have been the spike through the brain at start. The screen looks sharp and the responsiveness to tap, drag, swipe looks really good.

2. The ability to use existing apps creates both an economy and a user base at launch, and there are a great many very useful iPhone apps out there, flashlights and gas passing notwithstanding.

3. I like the size. It reminds me of the Kindle DX, in that it’s large enough to get decent amounts of content on the screen without being so large to be cumbersome. The onscreen keyboard looks good in portrait mode and as a touch typist I expect that it will be usable. I’m not sure about the landscape iteration of the keyboard as the key spacing shifts meaning that there will not be common acclimatization between views.

4. I’m glad that there is a mic jack and a built-in speaker and that it will use the 30pin dock connector that is well known in the marketplace. I was disconcerted about the seemingly large border area, but then noticed where my hands fall on my Kindle II and see the design logic therein. It makes the screen look bigger than it really is, and your digits won’t block content while you use it.

5. Apple was good enough to allow their own Bluetooth keyboard to connect to the device, a missing from the iPhone and iPod Touch that they still need to rectify.

6. The small dock with attached keyboard looks pretty but I will have to wait to get hands-on to determine its usability. Gut check says the keyboard is too close to the screen and the screen will be too low for proper ergonomics. I know that a stilt or post would make it unbalanced and also ugly, but I’ll have to wait and see.

7. Hooray for external display support. Yes it requires a proprietary and likely expensive cable but at least you’ll be able to output to an external screen which is good because…

8. iWork retuned for touch. I am a big fan of iWork although I confess that my Numbers launch count is still less than 10, and my Pages launch count is less than 25. My Keynote launch count is a much bigger number. Keynote is a fabulous presentation tool and my favourite by far even though I am not allowed to use it at work for reasonable cause. I was hugely disappointed to hear CNET’s Brian Tong refer to Keynote as sort of a PowerPoint thing. Keynote is like PowerPoint like your grade one Jolly Numbers book is like, well like Numbers.

9. I like that the old apps work and that the SDK is already available. The company I work for full time has already updated our MonoTouch toolkit to build apps for the iPad. Encouraging the developer community is smart. I expect though that the iPad apps on the AppStore will cost more than the iPhone apps do today. Because they’ll drive a bigger screen. Kind of like changing the knobs on the Marshall so they go to 11.

10. Tap to change pages. When I saw the swipe to change pages in the demo, I cringed. My Sony PR 7XX eReader had that swipe to change pages. Unlike the 5XX series that had no touch screen, the 7XX did (resulting in lousy contrast and a horrible reading experience) and let me assure you that the swipe gets old fast. Fast like in ten or fewer swipes. Very glad to see the page change can happen with just a tap. It will be interesting to see how deliberate that tap will need to be.

The Seeming Disappointments

I accept that I may not the target audience for the iPad. I love the iPod Touch and my iPhone (except for data roaming charges, hopefully the Canadian carriers will stop assaulting travellers soon). I have two big displays on my Mac Pro, I chose the 17″ MacBook Pro and will again, and even was an early adopter of the MacBook Air (an action I am unlikely to repeat as its performance and storage are sadly lacking). For me, and for now, there are some significant missings on the iPad, that may actually keep me off the first generation buyers list. In no particular order;

1. No cameras. Yes I mean plural. The device needs two, one facing you and one facing opposite. Digital video cameras are very inexpensive and Apple could have kept the top end unit under a grand and put two cameras in it. There certainly is enough space. Given that they stuffed a video camera in the latest Nano and a still/video camera in the iPhone 3Gs, this is just a miss. I would certainly want to use this device for adhoc video conferencing.

2. Micro-SIM slot. Is space a problem on this thing? My iPhone takes an industry standard, universally available SIM card. The iPad takes a completely different micro SIM that most carriers don’t offer yet and that is not yet required by most any other device. Did someone get paid off to “think different” Dumb move.

3. Storage. 64GB? Max? Really? I cannot fit my iTunes library or Aperture library on my 64GB iPod Touch and I have no interest in doing even rudimentary photo editing on the small screen. The bigger screen could make this viable, but there simply isn’t enough space, nor is there any option for storage expansion. Instead of Micro SIM, they could have added a micro USB connection for use with an offboard storage unit. 500GB portable disk drives are highly affordable and I could use it for the lion’s share of content that I wanted close but don’t need live on the iPad.

4. No stylus. An iPad should have a stylus. Like the Wacom Cintiq idea but leveraging the touch interface. I would love to have one of these devices as a pad that I could take jot notes on or draw sketches or virtually whiteboard. When I saw the paint splotch invitation my hopes ran away from me.

5. I love the idea of the iBooks and the iBookstore. I also surprised myself after my Sony experience with how much I have come to love and depend upon my Kindle II. I do like the backlighting for low light conditions, the one place where the Kindle falls down. Some have said that the iPad is a Kindle killer because the cheapest unit is priced alongside the Kindle DX. Don’t forget that Whispernet is with your Kindle forever at no extra cost to you. Even if you could get by on 250mb per month with a device as rich as the iPad, it’s still an extra $180 per year for the equivalent of Whispernet. Plus the Kindle is designed as an appliance to do one thing, read books. I agree that the newspaper and magazine options on the Kindle are lacking, but you need to consider the cost of operation. We also have no idea what the books in the iBookstore will cost. Amazon is annoying customers by increasing the price of digital books. Apple has never been known as a price leader. Can we expect yet another DRMed ebook format? Oh boy.

6. Apple loves America. International deals coming. No dates, no costs. I understand selling to a target rich environment but do remember that there is a world outside the United States folks. You didn’t need to repeat the same crappy rollout of the iPhone on a global basis.

7. Ports. Where are they? When I first saw the pictures I mistook the speaker openings for USB ports. I think I’m still disappointed that they are not. A device likes this begs connectivity. We have no idea if it will support Bluetooth file transfer although given the lack of ports it had better.

8. I love seeing the enhancements to iWork. When pray tell will there be an update to iWork on the Mac? The only comment was documents will be compatible. I love the idea of Keynote on the iPad but I would really like more functionality in Keynote. Or even putting functionality back into Keynote that disappeared over the last couple of versions. Like Flash export.

9. Speaking of Flash. I’m not a fan of Flash not because it’s bad but because so many web designers use so much of it, and do so badly. HTML 5 may be the emerging standard but there is a lot of stuff out there that needs Flash and while Mr. Jobs may think Adobe is lazy, the customer could care less about his opinions on Adobe. Safari supports Flash on the Mac and on Windows. If it slows things that badly (I see it does) hop up the horsepower or provide some mid stream converter. I won’t be sad to see the bloat of Flash turn fishbelly white and float down the creek, but it won’t happen next month.

A number of people have rang me up to ask what I think of the iPad, and while I suppose it’s a decent first cut, I’m underwhelmed so far. Will I buy one? That will be highly dependant on the level of abuse the carriers in Canada will be seeking to apply for 3G always on connectivity including international use. I’m in the US very often and the idea that I would not be able to use 3G data without a second mortgage is highly unappealing. I would not go with the WiFi only unit because WiFi is neither as ubiquitous or as cheap as the mcmarketing professionals would have one believe. I think that the amount of onboard storage, lack of storage expandability and lack of video are all showstoppers for me. I use my kit to its maximum, and while I would love an iPad it reminds me too much of the MacBook Air, additional equipment instead of alternative equipment. Oh I will probably buy one when they come available, but I won’t be salivating waiting for the day. Unlike other reviewers who cannot see a use for an iPad, I can see several uses, but in the current form it doesn’t surface my needs well.

All images used in this post are the property of Apple Inc.