Apple iPad: First impressions

Even for someone who has only ever owned one Apple product (an iPod, since you ask), the prospect of getting your hands on an iPad, however briefly, is an exciting one. Perhaps a little too exciting if the picture of me to the left is anything to go by.

I’ll keep my thoughts on the iffy philosophy behind the iPad to a later post. Restricting myself to the device in practice though, it’s hard to find faults. It’s fast – as fast as the adverts everyone’s seen by now, both in the rotation of the screen when turned on its side, and in opening and running applications. The onboard version of Safari renders pages quickly and with few glitches, save for the fact that it doesn’t display Flash, and apps like YouTube and Maps show that for all the talk of the burgeoning conflict between Google and Apple, the Mountain View-based search giant is still happy to provide Apple product owners with some fantastic software.

I’ve not had chance to do a full road test on the iPad, though. My interactions with the device described variously as a ‘game changer’ and ‘the future of computing’ have been limited to a half-hour play in the office canteen, with a unit brought in by Kelkoo’s International VP Bruce Fair, to trumpet their distribution of the iPad whenever it comes out. I didn’t have time for the lull in enthusiasm that apparently comes after first using with the device, never mind to get through it in the way described in Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger’s sober video review.

But I did have it long enough to feel its restrictions, largely because they are achingly apparent in almost any of the areas using the device involves. I’ll post some more thoughts on that later, but for now it’s worth waiting to see what comes of the announcement of the new iPhone OS tomorrow, and whether those developments will be pushed retroactively to the 300,000+ iPads already sold in the US.

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