I’ve had my iPad for around six months now, and I wanted to put down some of my thoughts on it and where it fits into my life.
When I first got it (a week after launch), everyone wanted to know about it. Some of that magic has worn off, but it still turns heads. When I use it in public, everyone wants to know if I like it and how well it works. The number one question I get is, “how much a month does it cost?” and most people are surprised when I answer “nothing.” I have the WiFi model, and free WiFi is ubiquitous. The 3G model might be more useful for people who do a ton of traveling — and the addition of GPS is nice — but I’m not sure most people need it. It’s somewhat interesting that people assume that a mobile device has a monthly fee.
Since I got my it, I’ve stopped using my laptop for almost anything. For serious work, I have a desktop, and I use the iPad for almost everything else. The laptop only comes into play when I’m faced with the intersection of portability and work. For pure portability, it’s iPad all the way, and I use my iMac for straight work.
While the iPad is highly portable — much more so than a full laptop — I don’t take it everywhere like I do my iPhone. While the iPad provides a much better experience than the iPhone, it’s just not as essential. If I had to choose one device, it would be the iPhone. I find the myself taking the iPad places when I have a specific task for it in mind — if I want to write, or read a book. If I’m just going out, I usually leave it at home.
It shares a superficial resemblance with its smaller cousins, but very little beyond that; I use the iPhone and iPad very differently. The iPhone is geared more towards getting your attention for a short amount of time, while the iPad is better for focusing on one thing for an extended period of time. My iPhone is always asking for my attention: People call, text, or email, and I answer or reply. I turn all this stuff off on my iPad — If i’m reading a book or playing a game, the last thing I want is to be interrupted. It feels like something that should be used at its own pace.
When Steve Ballmer was asked about the App Store’s burgeoning catalog, he said that the majority were apps just to access web sites. I think that’s an exaggeration, but with a nugget of truth. With speed and real estate at a premium on the iPhone, native apps feel better, even when they have little to offer over a web app.
The iPad is the exact opposite. I use Safari for the majority of sites I visit, and the experience is fine. Because it’s both more capable and because I use it during times of leisure, I don’t feel the need for apps for most things. There are a few exceptions: I use Echofon because it doesn’t incessantly forget my credentials like Twitter does, and Reeder because Google Reader’s web interface is unusable on any platform.
I find iBooks provides an excellent reading experience, and I use it often. I’ve read several books on it, and I enjoy the experience immensely. One thing I’d love to see is improved notes and annotations. Right now, notes are plain text, and I’ve found occasions where I’d like to annotate passages with photos or video, and this isn’t possible. Even URLs pasted into notes aren’t linked — you have to laboriously copy and paste them.
Even with the gorgeous display on my iPhone 4, real estate wins the day. Reading on the iPhone is cramped and I almost never use it for the extended periods necessary to complete a book. The sync feature is nice, though, and I will pull out the iPhone to read short passages if I’m waiting in line or such. I’d love to see a retina display on the iPad 2, but I’m not holding my breath. It would be amazing, but I think the display is fine as is.
My major gripe with iBooks is the store. DRM is odious for something you’re ostensibly paying money to own. You’re also locked in to Apple devices, since they’re the only ones capable of handling the DRM. Perhaps if the price were low enough that they felt disposable, it would be okay, but $10-$15 is more than I’m willing to pay. Copy-protected titles are also less functional than their free counterparts: copy and paste is disabled in any purchased book. The selection is not there yet, either. This is true to an extent of other ebook stores, but the situation with iBooks is definitely worse. While it can read DRM-free ePub books handily, I haven’t found a single store selling the sorts of titles I’m interested in without copy protection. I’ve discovered that Adobe’s Digital Editions DRM is easily strippable, so I’ve purchased a number of ebooks with it from online retailers, removed the DRM, and read the resulting DRM-free books on my iPad. It’s quite a run-around, though, and many of the books seem to have been corrupted (intentionally?), so every purchase requires much care and attention. It also needs a full and unrestricted computer; you cannot purchase and read these books directly on the iPad. The situation is extremely unsatisfying, and I hope it improves in the future.
The PDF support could also use some work. It’s usually good enough, but it doesn’t feel as natural as reading ePubs. The main problem is that PDF layouts are pixel-precise, and cannot be zoomed and reflowed. You can zoom in if the text is too small, but you must pan around to read it. Using an orientation different from the one the PDF was laid out in is an exercise in squinting frustration. PDFs are completely useless on the iPhone’s smaller screen.
Some people find the iPad too heavy to read on. Your mileage may vary, but it doesn’t bother me. It’s significantly heavier than a paperback, but not much heavier than a hardbound book, and much less bulky. Even when I am traveling for work, I usually bring the iPad along so I have something to read.
I tried to see how viaible it was as a platform for working. For my job, at least, it’s not there, and I don’t know if it ever will be. Emacs runs natively on Macs, and it should be possible to port it to Cocoa Touch without much effort. But the nature of Emacs precludes it from ever getting approved in the app store, unless it was neutered to the point of near-uselessness. It depends on running lots of interpreted code and calling out to UNIX utilities which probably aren’t available.
I tried the next best thing, using the iPad as a SSH terminal with iSSH, a $5 universal SSH/Telnet/X11/VNC client. This isn’t as nice as native Emacs, because you need another system to log in to, but it could make an acceptable stopgap. First thing: the touchscreen keyboard is unusable for this kind of thing. The only reason a soft keyboard is viable at all is because of the autocorrection and completion features, neither of which work in iSSH. This isn’t a knock on the program, it’s just how things are.
With an external keyboard, the situation is improved, though still insufficient. You have the full screen for display, but the modifier keys on the keyboard don’t work. There is an open thread about this in the iSSH forums, but there doesn’t appear to be a fix forthcoming. You also cannot remap caps lock to be a control key. which is essential for efficient Emacsing. If these issues were addressed, the situation would be tenable — barely.
The other place it fails as a programmer work machine is in the multitasking model. I don’t have iOS 4.2 yet, but even when I do, it won’t be very useful. When I’m coding, I need the ability to quickly switch apps, but more importantly, I need to br able to SEE other apps. I very often have a primary Emacs window up with my code, and a web browser off to the side with reference material — API documentation and the like. I code, then glance at the docs, then go back to coding. There is nothing in iOS that can make this work, and I don’t know if there ever will be; it just requires a windowing model. I wholly admit that it’s not a case the average user cares about, but it certainly impacts my ability to consider the iPad a serious work machine.
On the other hand, my iPad has almost completely supplanted my iPhone and iMac as my preferred game machine. I’m obviously not a hardcore gamer, but hear me out. When Steve Jobs announced the original iPhone back in 2007, he touted the flexibility of the touchscreen to adapt to whatever sort of input the user needed, something physical input devices can’t do. This all falls down with games, particularly ports.
Games written with care for touch input can be fantastic: Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor, Angry Birds, Zen Bound and so on. The problem is with action games that try to replicate d-pad style controls on a touchscreen. These are universally terrible, and it’s really too bad. There are two massive problems:
The iPad is a lot better for #1, because the screen is so much bigger. The second problem, though, that’s s doozy. I played Assassin’s Creed 2 on my iPhone for a while, but the controls were just too rough. I’d end up dying because I hadn’t managed to stab the right bit of the screen, and it was quite frustrating. I played the same game on a NDS, and even with a smaller screen and worse graphics, it was much more enjoyable because the controls were massively better.
The best controls in a platform-style game I’ve found have been in Mirror’s Edge. They’re entirely gestural, feel natural, and aren’t frustrating. It’s clearly an exception to the general rule, and it has simpler controls which are more easily adapted to gestures.
Despite my criticisms, I really like my iPad, and I’m probably going to get the new one when it comes out. And despite my problems with it as a work machine, it’s quite capable for others’ needs. And the keyboard is really quite good: I wrote the bulk of this post with the touchscreen, then used a Bluetooth keyboard for final edits, cleanup, and posting.