The Apps
The native iPad apps have shrunk in number versus the iPhone, and—with the exception of Safari, Mail and the App Store—the remaining apps carry much less weight. Which is to say, you won’t use them as much as you do on an iPhone. The iPad is really all about the applications and content that developers will create.
App Store and iTunes
Quite honestly, the App Store on the iPad is now the best way to get apps. Navigating and finding apps feels far more serendipitous and engaging than pointing and clicking on a desktop, and with the screen real estate, you can actually see the store and app previews, unlike the iPhone. It manages to fracture one of biggest advantages, though, by jerking you out of the App Store every time you buy an app. This should feel seamless, and allow for more of a shopping spree. If the transactions happened almost invisibly, it wouldn’t feel like you’re spending money as apps pop onto your iPad, and you wouldn’t feel like you’ve got whiplash, either.
Also, the most fundamental problem with the App Store remains: The interface breaks down when you’re trying to sort through a sea of 150,000 apps to discover a few you’d really want. And the iPad’s sole surviving instance of Cover Flow, a floating widget of app previews at the top of the home screen? Kinda gross lookin’.
The iTunes store looks and feels like the App Store in terms of basic navigation and layout, but it’s obviously built around previewing and purchasing music, movies and TV shows, so the interface is kinda like a touchified version of the main iTunes Store interface on the desktop. Tapping album covers or film posters flips them around to show you the basic info with previews. One of the big changes is being able to download movies—even 5GB HD flicks—over Wi-Fi. (Though I wouldn’t really recommended it, since my bigger download errored out a whole bunch.)
Safari
The velocity of scrolling, zooming and panning around web pages in Safari is one of the first “whoa” moments you’ll have with the iPad. It’s superfast, which is why it feels so awesome. The size is the other component—being able to see that much of a website radically alters the experience, turning it into something that’s incredibly satisfying. Really, you’ve never felt anything like it.
There are a few problems, though. (And I’m not even talking about Flash. In case you were wondering, no, there’s still no Flash. It hasn’t affected me once since so many sites have remade themselves for the iPad, and the one time I did get upset, I quickly remembered that a Hulu app is coming. YMMV without Flash though.)
Safari’s one place where the iPad’s memory shortage makes itself apparent, since you’re limited to nine windows, and quite often, it dumps the contents of a window, so when you go back you’ll have to reload the whole page. That’s pretty annoying. This is also, I suspect, why it doesn’t have true tabs: People aren’t encouraged to open a bunch, because it can’t handle it. Still, tabs would be incredibly welcome for the sheer fact that the iPhone-originated process of switching between windows (click the button, you’re taken to a thumbnail view of your windows, then click the window) feels more tedious than ever. With this nice big display, it shouldn’t take two screens and multiple seconds to switch to a new window when everything else practically flies.
Something else we’d like? Text enlargement, like in desktop Safari. Our own Jesus, like many old dudes, prefers larger text. There’s no reason it can’t be done now. And when we’re scanning whole, giant web pages, there’s really still no “find in page” search feature?
Photos
The traditional photo album grid has never felt slicker. Zooming in really fast, incredibly smoothly, on huge photos is definitely one of those “oooo” moments, as is “pinch to peek.” The problem? Getting your photos on there and syncing is still pretty messy, pulling them in albums via iPhoto or in specific shots via iTunes. Legitimate connections to online photo services would be nice too, so you could populate it with your Flickr or Picasa or Facebook photos. Hopefully these services will soon roll out apps to handle this from their end.
Mail
Given that it looks so much like its iPhone forebear, perhaps more than any other iPad app, you’d be forgiven for not realizing it’s one of the most important apps on the iPad. In truth, it makes use of every new bit of user interface, and it’s the starting ground for so many other apps, from RSS readers to Instapaper to Twitter clients.
In landscape, it uses the split view, with your inboxes or messages on the left, and the contents you’ve selected on the right. The panes look and feel like their respective iPhone screens, just fused all together. If you hit “new message” or “reply,” an overlay pops up with the keyboard, which takes up half the screen, and a message box that doesn’t quite cover the entire top half of the screen. (You’ll see this messaging overlay pop up again and again in apps like Twitterific.) Adding contacts takes place via a scrollable popover—like the old contacts list, but it doesn’t take up your entire screen.
Portrait mode is more focused: When you select a message, it’s all you see. To switch to a new email or look elsewhere in your accounts, you have to bring up a popover, which runs down the entire length of the iPad shows you the rest of your inbox. The mode overall is good if you have a hard time concentrating, but navigating via the popover can feel a little disjointed.
Overall, Mail works great, but the same functional limitations as the iPhone version still apply, like no unified inbox, no push Gmail, and the inability to attach a file to a message from inside the app. The list goes on, and these shortcomings feel more pronounced because of the power and size of the iPad.
Contacts, Notes and Calendar
Contacts is one of the literal “I’m a book!” apps that takes it a little far for no apparent reason. But cheesy art effects aside, in structure it’s like iPhone contacts but with a two-pane view, like the Mac Contacts app. Notes is essentially the same as the iPhone with more “realism” added via the subtle outline of stitched leather surrounding the yellow legal pad. It’s still gross.
Calendar, on the other hand, is a graceful application that makes the iPhone Calendar feel too constrained, and the desktop iCal feel too convoluted. Sort by day, week, month or list (showing the next 10-15 events). In day or list view, the list of events is in the left pane, and a closeup of individual events or days is in the right pane. Week and month views zoom out to a traditional calendar view, where popovers reveal event details. A scrubber on the bottom lets you quickly zip to any day or week, depending on the view. It’s really nice, at least for basic calendar usage.
Maps
It’s iPhone Maps, but bigger and so, so much faster, and that’s a world of difference when you’re talking about zooming around the world.
YouTube
It’s hard to believe this is YouTube, almost—it looks too polished. The streamlined interface is miles ahead of what you get when you type youtube.com on your desktop. I can actually just sit and watch YouTube for the first time ever, also thanks to the surprisingly great video quality.
iPod and Video
iPod seems a little out of place, I have to say. It doesn’t quite look like anything else, though that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s the jukebox essence of desktop iTunes, stripped to the silver bone because it only does one thing: Play music. Considering what iTunes is like on the desktop, that’s kind of refreshing.
Videos is similarly stripped down. It shows you videos. Touch, and it flips to info about the video. Touch again, and it plays. (Our test notes on iPad video here.) Generally speaking, anything shot in artsy super widescreen looks a little weird—like any Wes Anderson movie—since there’s a ton of black between the bars and the bezel. The rub is that the movies where that effect is the worst also suffer the most from zooming to fill the screen, chopping off massive amounts of the picture. (A necessary evil, unfortunately.)
Apps that essentially mono-task are fine, and they definitely expose how goddamn unwieldy the desktop iTunes as grown (as well as the fact that Apple is aware of this), but there are definitely missing features we’d like to see. If the iPad is designed to be used in your house, why can’t you music and videos from your desktop to your iPad using iTunes, right inside these apps? Seriously. And why isn’t iTunes Remote iPhone app updated for iPad, to be used to control your desktop’s iTunes? Little things like that would add up to make the iPad feel that much more connected.
Magic Spells, a Computer and a Cloud
The moments where the iPad’s spell dissipates are when it runs into this uncanny valley between unique modal tablet and standard personal computer: It feels so much like a computer from the future sometimes that you just expect it to do stuff you can do with your laptop. When it can’t, you get kind of depressed. Like when you want to flip a couple of IMs out without ditching your entire Scrabble game, or you really just want to send an attachment in Mail, or do something really basic like save a PDF so you can read it later. (You can’t do this without a separate 99-cent program, GoodReader; without that, you have to re-download your PDF every time.)
And how about the entire setup process, which slavishly ties it to another computer with iTunes. It can’t replace your parents’ complicated desktop, because you need that complicated desktop to setup the iPad, and then to manage your music and videos (not to mention software updates down the line), so it’s frozen as a secondary device. Then are the moments you wish it was more connected, like a phone. Take the Nexus One. Two minutes out of the box, a minute after punching in my email address, all of my contacts and emails are there. I didn’t plug it into anything.
In other words, it’s the moments where the iPad feels like it could be more, and you know it in your hands, in your fingers, as you’re holding it. That it has this potential to do this or that, but it doesn’t yet, and you really really want it to, because you’re so incredibly enthralled with everything it already does.
Potential. Promise. Hope. That, if anything, is the real magic of it. In the meantime, it’s off to a pretty good start.
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