PC Mike Review of the iPad

After five days, here’s my list of iPad joys and disappointments
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nowBuzz up!It’s now been five full days with the iPad, a lot of hours reading, consuming media and using it pretty much 10 hours a day and I’m now ready to talk about my joys and disappointments.

Before doing so, let me say loud and clear that I really do love this thing.

I am glad I bought it and am even more glad that I have the 3G unit on order for later this month. I think that it is every bit as revolutionary as the iPhone was three years ago and that, when tech history is written, the iPad will be the single device that most changes the way we use media.

In the first three days, Apple sold more than 450,000 of them. That’s huge. It’s selling faster than the iPhone did in 2007.

For the first few days, I’ve struggled with trying to describe just what it is. The iPad is much more than a smartphone. It’s way more than an iTouch on steroids. But it’s somewhat less than a laptop.

Here’s what I’ve settled on: It’s a media consumption device that also does e-mail and some essential but elementary computing tasks. And as a media consumption device, it takes web surfing, e-book reading and video watching to a whole new level.

I’m using it to manage my calendar and schedule better than I ever have before, handle e-mail, blog, Tweet, update Facebook and read more newspapers and online videos than ever before.

But it comes with a steep cost. Besides the price of the device, from $499 to $699 for the WiFi unit, and $130 more for the coming 3g version, the apps that make it so cool will soon drain your wallet.

Right now, the iPad only works on WiFi networks. That 3G AT&T version won’t be out for a few weeks yet.

But I have found a perfectly adequare workarounf. If you have the Novatel MiFi 2200 Mobile Wi-Fi Hotspot Modem from Verizon, you can create a 3G network of your own on the Verizon network and thus, use that iPad anywhere. Downside is you’ll have to pay Verizon a monthly fee, starting at $39, for that service. But since Verizon arguably has the nation’s best 3g coverage, that MiFi card is an attractive solution for many.

Now that the initial rush of giddiness is wearing off, I do have some disappointments to list. Here are my top five in order of importance:

No Flash – Steve Jobs must be a prideful, stubborn man. That is the only explanation that explains his refusal to include the Net’s video standard on what otherwise would be the best web browsing tool anywhere. Yes, Flash is a memory hog. But the fact is maybe 80% of all the websites that use video use Flash. That is a huge problem for serious iPad users. No Hulu. Very limited TV shows or newspaper videos. Not having Flash is so huge it’s almost a reason NOT to buy an iPad. Almost

No Printing – I’m sure there will come some cumbersome third party app-like workaround just for the iPad. But it’s not out yet and because printing is not native, whatever app eventually comes out will be far from seamless. I really would like to print out e-mail and web pages, Pages documents and e-mail attachments. I can’t, at least without jumping through a lot of hoops like e-mailing it to a computer and printing it out there.

Expensive apps – The apps for the iPad are, by and large, way more expensive than the apps for the iPhone. The Wall Street Journal costs $4.99 a week. Most magazines are $5 an issue. There are a lot of double digit apps. Apple’s iWork suite of Pages, Keynote and Numbers costs $30. When the AT&T 3G version comes out in a couple weeks, unlimited access will be $30 a month. The iPad is like a slot machine. I spent nearly $100 on apps the first weekend I had the iPad. To be sure, there are lots of free apps. There are cool weather apps, USA Today is free for now, so are some games. But by and large, compared to the iPhone, I’ve found the iPad apps to be costly.

No Camera – Come on, Jobs, how much more difficult would it have been to add a front facing camera? A camera would have made this the perfect video conferencing tool.

Skimpy built-in apps – What happened to stocks and the clock apps? Those are the two standard iPhone apps I miss the most. The clocks app was a great alarm clock.

So there you have it. Except for the lack of Flash and printing, the others are NBD. Still, their absence is irritating and disappointing.

I’m sure I’ll get over it and all five will eventually come to a solution or be made irrelevant by future improvements. Apple has already announced plans to solve one long time iPhone gripe that has carried over to the iPad… the lack of multitasking. That will be fixed with the update to the iPhone 4.0 operating system this summer. Multitasking will come to the iPad by software update this fall.

The iPad is not perfect. But it’s mighty cool anyway.

Here’s my NBC-TV PCMike segment:

This article was posted by Tech Reporter Mike Wendland. It has been archieved under Apple/Mac News, NBC PCMike, What I'm Thinkin'.






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