I'm writing this review from the future. I'm writing it from a magical device, filled with wonder and the promise of better things still to come. Or alternately, I could just be writing this from an evolutionary dead end, equipped with a gimpy ARM chip, a little bit of RAM, and some flash memory hooked up to a 10-inch LCD screen. Whether it's a harbinger of a closed, innovation-dead world haunted by locked-down computing or the gateway to a better world of computing, where applications never crash and the world is just a finger-swipe away is hard to say. What I can tell you today is that, love it or hate it, the iPad is going to change things.
Because the iPad really needs no introduction, I'm going to take advantage of my bully pulpit to talk about what Tested's reviews are really about. When we first started talking about Tested, there were two things I wanted to change about tech sites. First, I wanted to avoid the cynicism about technology that pervades so much tech coverage--we're living in the midst of the biggest technological revolution the world has ever seen, and goddamnit, that's exciting! I also wanted to break free of speeds and feeds-based reporting around products. It doesn't matter if product X is 12.8% faster than product Y unless product Y is slower than I'd like it to be. While this seems to conflict with my Maximum PC, speed-at-all-costs roots, I don't think it does. It just marks the transition from a time when most computers were slow and shitty to today's world where a $500 PC is fast enough for most people. Performance has become a binary criteria--products are either fast enough or not fast enough. In the post-performance oriented world, the questions I'm interested in are simple: Does this product do something I need or want? Is it better than the stuff I already have?
So, with that in mind, here's the official Tested iPad review. (If all you want to know is whether to bust out the credit card, I'll give you the TLDR version up front: You should wait, but probably just for the 3G version.)
After a couple of weeks of nearly constant iPad use, my feelings about the device remain mixed. Now that the new's worn off of Apple's tablet, it's a little heavier than I'd like when I'm holding it in one hand, but it's a much more comfortable way to use the Internet on the couch than my laptop or netbook. It doesn't get hot or warm when I use it. I haven't had to think or worry about its battery life. It's very clearly not a PC, and in some ways, it's incredibly limited. Managing files and sharing them between apps is, frankly, a nightmare. It famously doesn't support Adobe Flash. And, for some inexplicable reason, you need to connect it to an iTunes-enabled computer before it will do anything. But, by harnessing cloud apps, like Dropbox, Gmail, and Google Calendar, all the data that's most important to me is effortlessly available on my iPad. And, the iPad might be the ultimate media consumption device--you can decide for yourself whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.
Performance
The iPad is the perfect example of why speeds and feeds are becoming less relevant. By all rights, this device should feel painfully slow and be outperformed by the least capable of $299 netbooks. However, because Apple used the stripped down iPhone OS on the iPad instead of a heavier desktop OS, the iPad feels stupendously fast, especially compared to other ARM-based devices--smartphones like the iPhone 3Gs, Nexus One, and Palm Pre Plus. The integrated apps all feel significantly faster than their iPhone counterparts do on a 3Gs. That's not to say that the iPad is fast, simply that the things you do most--scroll, zoom in and out, and flip pages--all feel fast.
That's not to say that everything you'll do with the iPad is crazy-fast. In particular, I found Apple's Pages app, the stripped-down word processor, positively pokey. While I couldn't type faster than the app could handle, there was visible lag when typing or scrolling the page. It wasn't slow enough to make the app difficult to use, but it was definitely noticeable.
The slowdowns weren't limited to Pages either, we had slowdowns in several third-party apps, including games and productivity apps. We also found that the more complex applications, specifically the photo editors and retouch programs could be very sluggish--and definitely pushed the limits of the iPad's hardware. We also experienced framerate issues in multiple games, including Sam & Max and Plants vs. Zombies.
Despite a few sluggish apps, the iPad feels significantly faster than a comparably priced netbook running Windows. The OS gets out of the user's way, so I never felt like i was waiting on the machine. Initial boot takes about 20 seconds, but after that, waking the iPad from sleep is essentially instantaneous.
The Experience
The iPad is very clearly a device that's supposed to be held while using, on the couch, on a plane, in a chair reclining, whether it's resting in your lap or on your knee. While you can easily use it in any orientation--it switches from portrait to landscape very quickly--I find myself using it most often one of two ways. Either Commander Data-style tucked into the crook of my left arm, tapping the screen with my right hand or resting on my lap or chest when I'm in a sitting or reclining position. While you could use it at desk or table, you either need to prop it up on something or it rests flat, which forces you to hunch over it in a decidedly uncomfortable way. It's a little heavy to hold one-handed while reading--something that's not a problem when using a traditional eBook reader, like the Kindle--and it can be awkward to prop up for movie or TV watching, unless you ponied up for a case with a stand. I managed to watch a few movies in bed using Netflix and AirVideo by propping it up against some pillows, but this was not a great solution.
And, you'll be able to watch more than a few movies on a single charge. We were able to play almost 16 hours of standard-definition, mostly black-and-white videos from the Prelinger archives. During our less formal testing, the only way we were able to run the battery down before the end of the day on the Wi-Fi model down was by playing 3D games for hours, non-stop. Streaming movies from Netflix ate less than 10% of the reported battery per film. I never found myself worrying about battery life when using the iPad.
The iPad's screen looks fabulous. It's bright, clear, and crisper than a 1024x768 screen has any right to be. The bezel, which looked overlarge in photos is actually a little too small to allow easy one-handed operation, when reading a book or watching a movie. I find that I accidentally turn pages in iBooks or the Kindle app more often than I'd like when my finger moves into the page-turning area of those apps. And, although I was very concerned about eyestrain using the backlit LCD, it hasn't been a problem so far. I've read a couple of books on the iPad so far, a ton of comic books, and a bunch of web articles. Late at night, I simply turn the brightness on the display as low as it will go.
Gorgeous though it might be, the screen is incredibly susceptible to fingerprints--you don't notice them as you're using it, but after a few minutes it looks absolutely disgusting, even if you have clean hands. If you're going to buy an iPad, make sure you also grab a couple of microfiber wiping cloths. You'll need them.
As for actually using the device? Touching the screen to browse the web, interact with pages, and launch and use apps feels incredibly natural and works beautifully with the iPhone OS's user interface. While some of the native apps don't make particularly good use of the additional screen real estate--most notably the Home screen--the majority do, thanks to two new user interface additions: split view and popovers. Split view is roughly analogous to a traditional two-pane email app. A sidebar includes navigation elements or content selection, while the other half displays the aforementioned content. Popovers are simply small popups that display relevant context-sensitive info inside your app's window. In the shot below, you can see how Mail uses both split view and popovers to display much more information per pixel than you'll see on the iPhone or iPod Touch.
Typing, on the other hand, sucks. While I've gotten to a passable level after about two weeks, I don't see myself getting much faster or more accurate. The keys are too far apart to use with my thumbs when I hold the iPad by the lower corners in portrait orientation, and I have to rest the iPad on my lap or a table to type in landscape. And while you can connect a Bluetooth keyboard to the iPad, you'll need to use that in conjunction with a case--one that integrates a stand--or the Dock accessory. I found it virtually impossible to manage the keyboard and the screen on your lap separately.
First-Party Software
The iPad ships with relatively few apps: Mobile Safari, Contacts, Calendar, Mail, YouTube, iPod, Videos, Notes, Photos, and Maps. There are a few notable iPhone stalwarts missing--Clock, Calculator, Weather, Voice Recorder, and Compass, to name a few. However, the alarm clock functionality of the Clock app is the only thing that's not easily replaced with a better app from the App Store. Each of the first-party apps that made the cut was redesigned for the iPad. They're all very slick, easy to use, and make the iPhone versions of the same apps feel instantly old and busted.
I'll touch on each of the first-party apps briefly, and take you on a quick look into the App Store and iTunes store, but for the most part, the first-party apps aren't the reason you'd want an iPad. While they're useful, the many thousands of apps already available in the App Store are the iPad's secret sauce.
Mobile Safari
Unlike the iPhone, where I only use the browser as the last resort for information that I can't get using an app or RSS feed that is more appropriate for the small screen, I found myself using Mobile Safari frequently. The browser lives somewhere between a fully-featured desktop browser and the limited mobile browsers typically found on phones. Mobile Safari is far from perfect, but it's a significant step up from the iPhone version of the browser. The iPad's screen is more than large enough to handle rendering the real web, but many sites force the iPad to the mobile version of the site, and some others just plain don't work, and we haven't even touched on Flash yet.
The upshot on Mobile Safari is that it lives in a no-mans land, between the mobile and desktop world. The lack of Flash is an annoyance, but I'm more concerned by the fact that there's no extension architecture and overall performance with Javascript is bad. And, some Javascript simply doesn't work. While basic Javascript seems to work OK, it's inconsistent, and fails when you visit more complex pages. The performance hit is especially evident when you load a lightbox popup image or try to type in a WYSIWYG HTML editor. Using the SunSpider Javascript benchmark, which is representative of real-world Javascript-heavy tasks, we found the iPad to be roughly an order of magnitude slower than a two-year-old MacBook Pro running Firefox 3.6. The MacBook Pro took 657ms running Safari 4, 1,224ms running Firefox, and 10,641ms on the iPad's version of Mobile Safari and 14,572ms for the iPhone 3Gs. I said earlier that speeds and feeds aren't important, but this poor Javascript performance will limit how you use the device, locking out Javascript heavy sites, like Gmail and Google Docs, and even preventing you from using dynamic elements of simpler sites--such as our comment form and lightbox image popups on websites.
It's also disappointing that there's no option for extensibility whatsoever in the browser, you can't save downloaded files, aside from photos, and the browser is missing the ability to sync bookmarks over the air. While Mobile Safari is perfectly acceptable for browsing the web, it's not particularly good for interacting with it.
Even with all those problems, the benefits of the platform--an instant-on device that never gets too warm for your lap and weighs just 1.5 pounds--make the iPad great for browsing the web. If the iPad was paired with a world-class browser, like Chrome, Firefox, or full-strength Safari, it could become a truly revolutionary piece of technology.
Calendar, Contacts, and Notes
Despite the fact that the iPad is a decidedly post-paper device--given one, a place to charge at night, and your schedule and contact data stored in the cloud--you'll never miss your Rolodex. The Calendar and Contacts apps both use traditional paper metaphors for your data, which is especially funny to me, since I haven't carried paper versions of either since I bought a Palm III more than a decade ago. Despite the anachronism, they both work well, syncing with MobileMe, Exchange, or Gmail.
Notes also mimics paper, this time a simple notepad. However, the Notes app only allows text input using the keyboard, you can't actually write or draw on the screen using your finger. Note also lacks an easy mechanism to sync the notes you take on the device to the Internet. The only way to get text out of Notes? Email the files to yourself or sync the iPad with your primary computer--Notes don't even sync across MobileMe.
The iPad's Mail client is a high point. The device is especially well suited to email reading and management--although the keyboard issues make writing long emails a hassle. The instant-on nature of the iPad makes it easy to pick up and check email, just like the iPhone. Unlike the iPhone however, the larger screen makes it easy to simultaneously view your inbox and individual messages at the same time.
The Maps app on the iPad is exactly like the one on the iPhone--it's just faster, bigger, and better in almost every way. The updated maps app adds Street View and a terrain layer to the traditional street, satellite, and hybrid views. While you'd think that the biggest problem with Maps is the Wi-Fi iPad's lack of a GPS tranceiver, it does a very good job geolocating you using a combination of your IP address and the location of any Wi-Fi access points in your vicinity. The big problem is that Maps requires an online connection in order to work. Without a constant connection to Google Maps, you get no mapping mojo. While that limitation will prevent you from using Maps on the go, it's still handy to have for reference when you're connected to the net.
YouTube
Like the iPhone's app, the iPad YouTube app gives an optimized front-end for convenient viewing of the best pet videos on the Internet. However, because YouTube's touch-screen site gives native access to iPhone OS-compatible videos, i don't really see the need for the limited app version anymore.
iPod and Videos
It didn't really make sense to us, but for some reason, Apple split the video playback functionality and the music playback functionality into two separate apps: Video and iPod. The iPod app closely mimics the iTunes interface, allowing you to navigate your collection and view and manipulate playlists at the same time. While this would be really convenient if you loaded the iPad with thousands of songs, we didn't find the iPad to be a particularly convenient MP3 player. It's just physically too big, and it seems to me that you'd be better off using the iPad's capacity for movies and apps--and listening to music on a pocket-sized dedicated device.
Videos is a much simpler app, with basic menus for TV shows and movies, which can either be files you've ripped yourself, digital copies you've gotten with Blu-rays or DVDs, or content you've purchased from the iTunes store. It displays meta-data, cover images, and all the other stuff you'd expect. As with the iPod software, the only way to get content onto the iPad is to either download it directly from the iTunes store or sync with your computer.
There's no camera on the iPad, but it makes a decent, if very expensive photo frame. You can sync photos using iPhoto on the Mac or iTunes on Windows, download them from the web, or use a third-party app to pull them from another online photo service. The process works much better using iPhoto on the Mac--syncing metadata on people and events.
Third-Party Apps
The true power of the iPad becomes apparent when you visit the App Store and start downloading. There are already thousands of apps that let you use the iPad with damn near anything. You can stream movies from Netflix, download comics from Marvel, stream music from Pandora or Last.fm, buy books from Apple or Amazon, connect to social networks, or simply play a game. And, if you can't find an iPad-native app that does what you want, odds are good that there's an iPhone app that will work--although the iPhone apps look particularly unsavory on the iPad's screen--whether you run them at native resolution or enable the pixel doubling option.
Of course, third-party apps are hobbled until iPhone OS 4.0 comes out for the iPad this autumn. Without multi-tasking APIs, utilities like Last.fm and AIM are much less useful. I found the pop up push notifications to be much more intrusive on the iPad than they are on the iPhone, simply because I'm typically doing something that's more involved on the tablet.
The one place that a third-party app is truly competitive with Apple's first-party apps is the eBook. The Kindle app is superior to iBooks in nearly every way. With several different color schemes including a sepia tone paper that's much easier on the eyes that pure white and the ability to turn off the precious page-turn animations that are de rigeur in the iBooks app, we'll continue to buy our books in the Kindle store, at least until a DRM-free alternative is available. Speaking of DRM-free books, that's the only way that the iBooks app is superior to the Kindle app--it supports DRM-free ePub books--which you can find all over the Internet.
We've already spoken about a whole host of iPad apps on the site, but here are a few of my favorites.
How Does It Make You Feel?
This sounds glib, but the iPad really makes me want to buy stuff. When it's in my hand, I can purchase virtually any kind of media--movies, TV shows, magazines, music, audiobooks, traditional books, comic books, and anything else that can be digitized and transmitted over Wi-Fi. While I don't typically buy movies from the iTunes store due to the DRM that Apple uses, the experience was just as easy as buying apps from the App Store. That said, there's very little content creation to be done on this device, at least until the apps start flowing in earnest.
It's also worth talking about the distraction factor. When I'm reading a book on the iPad, whether I'm using Amazon's Kindle app or iBooks, I frequently find myself checking in on other apps--whether it's an ongoing Words With Friends game, what's happening on Twitter, or just to take a peek at my email inbox. Of course, these things are so distracting because they're so easy. You're really just a couple of taps away from THE WHOLE INTERNET.
It's also worth reiterating what the iPad does exquisitely well. In addition to putting all the content you've purchased at your fingertips, the iPad also does a great job of making all of your data accessible. Whether it's email, contacts, and calendar or your Twitter feed, Facebook profile and Foursquare "Spam Your Friends" button, it's all a mere second or two away. Having a computer, however limited, that's instant-on and always around transforms "checking in on the Internet" from a a structured activity that takes 20 or 30 minutes to something that can happen whenever you have a free moment. I'll let you decide whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.
The Weird and the Bad
As we said before, the iPad's certainly not perfect. I'm not going to talk about the covered-to-death lack of Flash and the hefty weight for a device you should be able to use one-handed. I am going to talk about the general weirdness the iPad inherits due to its place in the no-mans-land between cell phone and real computer.
Take the initial out-of-box experience, for example. The first thing you do with a new PC or Mac is fire it up and create your user account. The first thing you do with the iPad is sync it with a real PC. While there are hints in OS 4 that this may not be necessary--the 4.0 beta includes the ability to enter your Apple ID sans iTunes--it's janky today. And, despite the fact that the device has oodles of battery and an always-on wireless connection, you still can't sync media wirelessly, nor can you schedule automatic downloads of podcasts or other free content.
The weirdness keeps getting weirder. Just like the iPhone, you can only sync the iPad with a single iTunes install. If you sync your iPad with a desktop computer at home--you know, the computer that you own that's most likely to have the most storage--that's the only place you can sync apps, books, movies, or music onto the iPad. While you can transfer files to individual apps from any iTunes-equipped PC, it's not easy. You do it by dragging and dropping them into the app menu in iTunes, but the process is confusing and perilous. If you try to sync your iPad with another iTunes library, it will nuke everything on the device and replace it with whatever you have locally.
What if you want to work on the same file using two different apps? That's impossible, without that same external iTunes connection. Because of the weird way that the iPhone OS partitions the phone's storage, two apps can't share access to the same files, unless the two apps are designed to work together or toss data from the tablet to the web and back again. That limitation alone is a deal breaker for the iPad as a serious content creation device. Can you imagine having to connect your PC to a second computer in order to open a document you created in Word using Acrobat? That's the way the iPad works. They only ways to get files onto the device involve either using iTunes, downloading them directly from the Internet, or receiving them as email. And what if the iPad's OS doesn't know what to do with a particular filetype? Tough luck, you simply can't download it.
The other major gotcha is backwards compatibility. While I was able to run every iPhone app that I tried on the iPad, it's not a good experience. You can choose to run the app either at native resolution, which centers it in the middle of the iPad's screen, or pixel-doubled, which stretches it to fill most of the screen. This effectively gives you a choice between apps that look tiny or awful. On top of that, emulated apps use the old-school iPhone-style keyboard for data entry, which is very difficult to use on the larger device, no matter which mode you use. I was able to play a few lo-fi games and apps that don't require much data entry, like Canabalt and Dropbox, but for the most part, backwards compatibility is a gimmick that you'll rarely use.
The larger, yet more ethereal problem I have with all of the iPhone OS devices is that the software you're allowed to install on devices you've purchased is controlled by Apple, specifically the capricious App Store approval team. This small group of people inside Apple decide what's appropriate or is not appropriate for the App Store, using an unpublished, seemingly Meese-ian "I know it when I see it" set of guidelines. The approval team follows a set of nebulous, private rules to determine what's acceptable and rejects any app that it feels isn't up to snuff. This means Apple has an iron lock over their platform, and the ability to stifle... well, anything it wants to. Of course, it's possible to jailbreak your iPad and run whatever you want, bypassing the App Store's Walled Garden, but should we have to do that for a device that costs as much as $900?
There are a host of other minor issues with the iPad. It lacks any kind of haptic feedback, so you'll never see rumble in games or touch-based feedback for typing, ala Android. It's extremely finicky about charging from USB ports--the only surefire way to charge it is to use the 10W power brick that Apple included with the device. The included USB cable is much too short for this type of device--it won't reach from the floor to a nightstand or table. These are minor complaints, but annoying nonetheless.
Is Now the Right Time to Buy an iPad?
Here's the thing. The iPad is one of a near infinite number of potential futures for computing. It will inevitably spawn a number of similar tablet-y products over the next few years, and many of them will address the problems with the iPad--the walled garden and Apple's iron lock on the platform. In fact, it's entirely possible that the iPad is an evolutionary dead end. Right now, it doesn't fill any existing niches, and it hasn't convinced me that I need a third screen. It's an incredibly sexy device, it's undeniably neat, and it's much easier to use than my iPhone or Nexus One. However, its size also makes it much less convenient to tote around than a smartphone, and the ingrained limitations make it much less useful than a computer.
But, when I balance the limitations of the iPad against the convenience of an always-on, Internet connected device with a real-screen, the convenience of hundreds of thousands of apps, and the ability to buy and view almost any type of media I might be interested in, the scales move closer to balanced. After using the iPad for two weeks, I'm less concerned by its lack of Flash than I am by its janky filesystem and lack of multitasking. The multitasking problem will be improved in OS 4, but the filesystem looks to be a continuing problem. I still worry that the iPad is just the latest reincarnation of the thin client fad that seems to pop up every ten years or so, but it's more capable than thin clients have ever been before.
Over the last two weeks, I've frequently left my five pound laptop at the office, something I haven't done in half a decade. Instead, I'm toting about two pounds of iPad and keyboard back and forth. While the iPad isn't a great solution for large-scale projects--I switched to a laptop and Google Documents about halfway through this review--I can definitely see myself carrying it sans laptop on personal and business trips and as a laptop companion on expeditions to trade shows. Even though the iPad is heavy for a single-handed device, it's positively svelte by netbook and laptop standards, even with a Bluetooth keyboard in tow.
And then, there's the media consumption aspect. On no other portable device can I watch movies I've ripped, TV shows I've purchased, stream films from Netflix, read comic and books, and listen to music or podcasts as conveniently and slickly as I can on the iPad. This is really the ultimate consumption device. Sure, much of the media you can purchase is encumbered by crappy DRM, but it's entirely within Apple's rules to rip your own content and put it on the iPad, and it excels at that.
Ultimately, for me, it boils down to size. My smartphone fits in my jeans pocket. My laptop and netbook requires a man purse, messenger bag, European carry-all, or satchel. So does the iPad. But the difference is that my laptop weighs six pounds and my netbook weighs three. Even though the iPad doesn't really replace a real PC, it's a capable stand-in and it weighs less than two pounds with keyboard and charger. Still, you don't need an iPad, but it is a convenient, useful device for using the Internet and consuming content. And, the big screen makes it much more flexible than the iPhone. Yes, the iPad is a big iPod Touch--that pretty much sums up everything that's good and bad with the platform.
And, whether I'm at home or away, the iPad is undoubtedly the ultimate bathroom computer.
Which iPad to Buy?
First off, you should know that Apple is almost certainly going to release a second-generation iPad within the next 18 months, and most likely within the next twelve. So, if you're going to be upset that your iPad is obsolete in twelve months, you probably shouldn't buy one.
Disclaimers aside, if you decide you want an iPad, I'm recommending that you wait for the 3G models. I haven't tested the 3G iPad yet, but for a device that's not upgradeable, it makes sense to buy the most fully-featured option available at the time you make the purchase. After all, the ability to turn the 3G iPad's data plan on and off on a month-to-month basis is very compelling if you don't travel enough to make a MiFi or similar device worth a monthly charge. But honestly, I'm more interested in having a GPS locator in the iPad than cellular data--the Wi-Fi version just feels limited without it.
As for capacity, the 32GB model seems like the sweet spot, if you like to watch movies. With some apps consuming almost 2GB of storage, the 16GB model looks too small. On the same note, the 64GB model seems bigger than necessary--the 32GB model I tested for this review was more than sufficient to hold a half dozen movies, as well as a few gigs of TV and music, with plenty of space left over for apps.
I guess that makes the short, short, short version of a very long review, "If you're going to buy an iPad this year, get the 32GB 3G model". It's really that simple.
Edit 4/20, 9:30AM: Fixed typos, added pullquotes.
