The northlondonhippy

I just want to share a few obser­va­tions about the iPad, now that I’ve had a cou­ple of days to fon­dle mine. Believe the hype.

I’m not going to give you a full review of it, there’s already been count­less detailed run-throughs of the iPad from peo­ple who’ve had them for ages. I got mine on Fri­day, UK launch day, so I know I’m late to the iPad party.

The first thing I really noticed was how ridicu­lously thin it is, its easy to hold but a lit­tle heav­ier than you might expect. Its also easy to sit in a com­fort­able nor­mal posi­tion on the sofa with it propped in your lap, bal­anced with a light one handed grip.

What I fore­see is a mar­ket for lap-pillow like stands, that keep it at a com­fort­able view­ing angle, while let­ting it rest securely with­out using your hands. For watch­ing films and videos, some­thing sim­ple like that would be ideal.

The screen is bright and extra­or­di­nar­ily sharp, hi-res colour pho­tographs look unbe­liev­ably crisp and clear with vivid, deep colours. Video also looks good, though its all been in stan­dard def for me so far.

Web­sites fill the screen smoothly, there’s no need to pinch and zoom to see or read any­thing. Like the iPhone, the inter­face is respon­sive and smooth.

It is a fin­ger­print mag­net, more so than my iPhone 3GS, which shares the same oleo­pho­bic coat­ing, but doesn’t seem to be as notice­able because of its smaller size. Keep a microfi­bre cloth nearby, or a lens cloth from any cam­era shop.

Apple’s case (or some­thing sim­i­lar) is absolutely an essen­tial acces­sory. The Apple Case for iPad is very well designed, its sim­ple to secure the iPad inside it. It is very thin and doesn’t add much addi­tional weight, but pro­vides extra pro­tec­tion and flex­i­bil­ity, allow­ing you to posi­tion the iPad for upright, wide screen view­ing, or angling it on a desk for more com­fort­able typ­ing. Its folio-style, with a flap that cov­ers the screen while dou­bling as a sort of reen­forced kick-stand. Its very good.

There are already a lot of iPad opti­mised apps out there, I’ll men­tion a few quickly that have grabbed my attention:

- Wun­der Radio — an inter­net radio sta­tion aggre­ga­tor that seems to offer just about every inter­net sta­tion in the world. It also uses GPS to gen­er­ate a list of local sta­tions and it did very well find­ing them around me. The audio streams are high qual­ity, there’s iTunes tag­ging for sta­tions that sup­port it and the inter­face is clean and easy to use.

- Air Video — I know this one is on the top of many people’s lists and for good rea­son, it works very well. Air Video let’s you stream just about any video file from a Mac on the same net­work, con­vert­ing the video on the fly as you watch. I’ve streamed .avi’s, MP4’s and hi-def MKV’s from my Mac Mini to the iPad already with­out any lag or drop out. You do need to install a small piece of soft­ware on the host Mac to act as server and point it to your video direc­tory in the Finder, but once you do that the iPad finds the server auto­mat­i­cally. From there you nav­i­gate to your film or tv show, and after a very quick buffer time of 5–10 sec­onds, the video is deliv­ered to your iPad. I already had this one for the iPhone and a recent update made it iPad friendly too.

- News­Rack — has been my RSS reader of choice for a while on my iPhone, with its sim­ple inter­face and abil­ity to sync with my Google Feed Reader account, it works very well. Now opti­mised for the iPad, the same app is serv­ing dou­ble duty for me, at no extra cost. News­Rack uses the extra screen real estate to good effect, giv­ing you a left col­umn for your feeds and a large read­ing win­dow on the right side. You can also open links within the app.

- Pin­BallHD — bought this one yes­ter­day on the strength of the reviews and sales in the iTunes app store, glad I did. The graph­ics and game­play blew me away and am find­ing it very addic­tive. Haven’t really played or bought many games for my iPhone, but I can see how much bet­ter the iPad is for play­ing any­thing because of its larger size.

The iPad is prob­a­bly more dis­rup­tive than any­one has realised yet, its an entirely new class of device. Other man­u­fac­tures will be try­ing to catch up, this form of com­put­ing is going to explode in pop­u­lar­ity. It can replace so many dif­fer­ent devices, not just lap­tops or net­books, but portable radios, portable TVs and DVD play­ers, MP3 play­ers, portable game con­soles, e-readers and prob­a­bly a mil­lion other things I haven’t even thought of yet. It is so thin, so light, so easy to carry along with you, the temp­ta­tion to never put it down is immense.

Is it an essen­tial? No, not if you already have some sort of com­puter, but as lux­u­ries go, it pretty damn use­ful. If you’re think­ing about tak­ing the plunge, all you need to do is spend 5 min­utes using one and you will be ready to dive in deep.