Playing With An iPad
7 April 2010, mid-morning
I got to play with an iPad yesterday. The boys at Form and Method bought one for their company, and Tyler brought it over to a friend’s place to let us all have a look. It is pretty slick. The screen is really bright and looks quite nice. The viewing angle is as wide as everyone has been talking about, which makes it a great communal device. It looks like it will be well suited for faux-boardgames. The computer is very snappy. It’s a very responsive machine, which is what you want in a device you minipulate with your hands. The bigger screen makes Safari a lot more useful. All the web pages I checked out loaded fine, and loaded quickly. Several people commented on how the iPad was smaller than they had expected, Shima included. Typing is a fair bit more awkward than typing on the iPhone. I could see getting better at it with practice, but I can’t imagine typing as fast on the iPad as I do on my iPhone. Of course, you can use a real keyboard with an iPad so maybe this won’t matter too much in practice. I want one. Apparently the device will launch in Toronto on the 24th of April, though I haven’t really seen any indication from Apple that this is the case. God damn it.