iPad

I'm typing this from my iPad this morning, the day after I received it via UPS. I wasn't sure it would make it to me, I was watching the shipment via the web, it got to me from China in less than 24 hours, when it got to my local facility, it appeared stuck in a warehouse, then at noon, just when I was about to give up, it showed up (according to the driver there was a miscommunication between apple and ups and the packages were all upgraded from Monday delivery to Saturday delivery at the last moment, requiring ups to bring on many extra drivers.).

So far I'm impressed with the device, some issues I'm not happy with, but it could be that I'm not familiar with the device. The first is email, the email client seems to always need to have an email open in it, I don't like this, I like to have my email open to a blank page or an email listing, but I guess I don't read email like Steve does, so I must be wrong. The other is the calendar, I have my calendar on Google, while my calendar connects to Google, it only seems to be downloading my default calendar, not all of my calendars on Google, not sure why, it works great on my iPhone.

iPhone apps work well on the iPad, but they work in a zoomed window, when you make the app larger, it appears a bit ugly (due to non-vectored images).

iPad apps are nice, the one from USA Today seems great, my mind goes wild after seeing this app. The NPR app is also very good. I've seen usability issues and crashes with all the apps I played with, I'm not sure if people really know how to exploit this type of a device given how they see people using it. Typing on the device has been tough, my fingernails are cut close! But the keep on tapping on the screen, some keys are odd, the shift key is in the wrong place and the comma must require a shift on a normal keyboard because I keep wanting to hit the shift key before hitting the comma. Netflix and ABC make this another good reason for the app, though both require wi-fi to work. I keep seeing apps crash, though after rebooting the iPad the crashes go away, I'm guessing there's a memory leak somewhere, I'm also guessing we'll see an OS update soon to fix this crashing.

Note Safari still doesn't handle web forms well on this device, sigh, this makes the iPad less of a cool tool for people who would like to blog online (to do my final editing of this blog I had to come back to my MacBook Pro).

There are VPN and RDP apps available, this could be useful for anyone in IT or anyone who has a computer controlled entertainment system, yeah that's right, the iPad could become a very cool remote control.

Should you get it? If you commute, I'd say yes, though you might want the 3G model. For business use I see a ton of applications, it could revolutionize business, especially research oriented applications, which is where I specialize. I'm dying to design and build out an app for it, hopefully I'll have that opportunity soon.