iPad is here

After weeks of eager anticipation, we are proud owners of an iPAD – the truly “family device” meant for casual computing.
Unlike the iPhone 3G (4 hour waiting in line), the wait time was a brisk 20 minutes. Yes, I reserved online!


The party started around Saturday (April 5th) lunch time and is still on!

I do plan to publish a series of posts. This one is on general features. The next one would be on the entire development experience. Yes, I did stay up most of Friday night getting my sample apps to work in iPAD Emulator (iPhone SDK 3.2) and remained very eager to get those running on actual device. That I did. So let us start with general features in this post!

Summary
What rocks: An amazing web browser, awesome photo album, and great book reader! Apple has put together the Netbook, e-reader, gaming device, photo frame and iPod features. Add-ons like movie rentals, 10 hours of battery life and the most-celebrated App Store on the planet are combined in a magical cocktail! 175,000+ apps and ~1000 iPad only apps.
What doesn’t: The iPad's size is a bit cumbersome, specially to carry. The iPad's lack of video camera, USB, missing Flash support and HD video output keep me wondering whether I should have waited for next year.
My Worries: Will this device survive a fall? Did I make a right choice not to buy the 3G version? How will life be without GPS?

Overview
iPad is a 8x10-inch tablet computer which combines laptop, smartphone, gaming console, and iPod into a single experience. The absence of an integrated video camera and no Flash video support is a damper. "Why do I need an iPad?" Apple says: The iPad is a Web browser for your living room, an e-book reader for the den, a movie player for the kids, a photo album, a jukebox, a gamer's best friend, a word processor, an e-mail machine, and a YouTube junkie's dream come true. No excuse good enough for you? Wait a few minutes and a developer will inevitably make an app for it.

Design
The screen is made of oleo phobic-coated glass which makes it easy to wipe away fingerprints. Behind the glass is a LED-backlit, 9.7-inch capacitive touch screen that uses IPS (in-plane switching) technology for different viewing angles. The home button is the same as on the iPhone and iPod Touch, switching between an open app and main menu. iPad is 7.47 inches wide by 9.56 inches tall by 0.5 inch thick, and weighs 1.5 pounds. It has a natural, magazine-like feel. Like the iPhone, it has a touch-friendly OS with an on-screen keyboard, and an accelerometer that detects device mode: portrait or landscape. The buttons, switches, and ports around the edges are same as iPhone. A 30-pin dock connector at the bottom, an integrated speaker, a volume rocker to the right and a switch that works to disable the iPad's automatic screen rotation in case you need to look at something sideways without the iPad assuming you want it rotated. The design feels very upscale. Compared to other tablets the iPad is a jaw-dropper!

Display
9.7-inch backlit LCD screen is comparable to net book screens. Images are sharp and vivid with technology called "in-plane switching" to ensure the display looks good when viewing at an angle. A built-in light sensor automatically adjust the screen's brightness based on its surroundings.

Web
With full-size pages which are true Web pages, not the scaled-down mobile versions, web browsing is nearly as good as a MacBook. Downside: No support for Adobe Flash! iPad users who visit a site that uses Flash will be greeted with error messages. Try sites like Hulu.com. CBS and Disney will format some shows online just for the iPad. Jury is out for the rest. Safari is the only Web browser for the iPad. That means no tabbed browsing support.

Books
iBooks store includes content from: HarperCollins, Hachette, Penguin, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster. Titles are organized by popularity and by genre. Users can preview the first few pages before purchasing, and putting in virtual bookshelf. iPad allows you to read books in either portrait or a landscape mode that shows two pages at once. Onscreen settings also allow changing the size of the text, searching text within the book, looking up words in a built-in dictionary, and hopping around using a persistent table of content. Public domain books and any EPUB book format (Project Gutenberg and Google Books) can be transferred to iPad via iTunes. Amazon Kindle app is available on the iPad. As an e-reader does not use e-ink technology. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and others don't use backlit LCDs because: they drain battery life; fatigue the eye; and become difficult to read in direct sunlight. You can read for four days on the Kindle without a recharge, compared with approximately 10 hours on the iPad. As on any LCD text isn't as easy on the eye as on printed paper. iPad works better in the shade than on sunlight. However, the presentation of books is absolutely gorgeous. Cover graphics and illustrations display in rich color, book pages have a deliberate paperlike tone, and turning pages by tapping or flipping is intuitive. Page turns
also render much faster than with e-ink technology, allowing you to quickly flip through pages. Unique features, such as in-book music and video playback
(when supported), and one-touch dictionary makes it a category winner. At least IMHO! Also, for magazines and photo essays, the iPad's color screen is a clear winner. iPad's ambient-light-sensing screen provides just enough light for an
in-bed read and automatically ramps up the brightness elsewhere.

Email
works with: Gmail, Microsoft Exchange, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, AOL and most other standard e-mail systems. Comes with a multi-pane view that shows inbox and a message preview window. Document and image attachments can be seen in full screen, and the search function looks through e-mail on both iPad and the server for most accounts. The downside? The weak onscreen keyboard makes it tough to type out long messages.

Keyboard On-screen virtual keyboard is about the size of a notebook keyboard, which looks impressive. But the virtual keyboard is not for typing long emails or text documents. Anyone looking for an external keyboard would need to buy ONLY from Apple for $69 because the device lacks a USB port.

iPhone OS
iPAD uses the mobile version of OS X : the iPhone OS. Very touch friendly and integrated with App Store, user don't need to worry about traditional issues,
scattered files on desktop, installing drivers for third-party hardware, or trying to figure out where you put a downloaded image went? Instead, all apps are clearly laid out, organized to respond to a single touch. A downloaded image, appears in one place – the photo library. Looking for something--a song, e-mail, photo, or Web page--double-clicking the home button brings up a Spotlight search feature. On the iPad, just like iPhone things are simple and DECLUTTERED! The only way for users to purchase and download movies, apps and music on the iPad is to use Apple's iTunes store. Compared with the more free approach of a Windows Netbook or Android, the iPad user is giving away freedom of choice in exchange for convenience. However, this control over the iPhone OS and the commerce within it also serves to minimize the iPad's vulnerability to computer viruses.
With a 1GHz Apple A4 processor, capacitive multitouch display technology, and a 802.1n compatible Wi-Fi, Apps launch within seconds; waking from sleep
mode is nearly instantaneous; and even a cold boot-up takes just 10 seconds.
Music
You can play songs in the background while you work on the Web, email or an app. The iPad's built-in mono speaker is ok, but users can plug in headphones
for dual/stereo sound. The iPad will also connect to other devices like wireless headphones through Bluetooth, and it can connect to home stereo systems.
iTunes on the iPad is very similar to the one on your computer. Scroll through itunes with your finger, or view by album with cover art.

Photos
Snapshots look great on the iPad's sharp display. Users can browse and sort photos with some cool tools. Preview the photos inside a folder by pinching
out to reveal the contents in a little scattered bunch of squares. You can also set up slideshows with music and use the iPad as a digital picture frame. The bad news: You'll have to import all of your snaps from elsewhere, because the iPad does not have a built-in camera.

Movies
Film buffs will love this sharp, crisp display. It is great for a personal video viewer on the road. But the iPad doesn't support the widescreen 16:9 format of most movies, so viewers will have to look at thick black edges on two sides -- or cut off some of the picture. The iPad also lacks a DVD drive, so movies will need to be imported into it also.

Battery
The iPad has 10-hour lifespan when playing video. The battery will last a full month on standby. But like the iPhone and iPod, the battery is built in. That means, if it dies you cannot simply pop in a new one; if the battery is broken, so is the iPad. Apple will replace the entire iPad device for a $99 service fee if you qualify for a battery replacement. That means the battery's charge capacity has simply worn down naturally. It doesn't cover water damage, or a device that's been dropped or modified in any way.

Accessories
There is a physical keyboard with an integrated dock ($69), a charging dock without the keyboard ($29) that engages the iPad's photo frame mode, a camera connection kit ($30) that includes both a USB and an SD card adapter for importing images from a digital camera, and a wrap-around leather case ($40) that doubles as a kickstand. Need the iPad for presentations, there is a $30 VGA adapter that can connect to a projector or computer monitor. Video output is only compatible with specific apps, such as Apple's Keynote. The maximum output resolution is only 1,024x768 pixels.

iWork software suite for iPad includes three apps: Pages (word processing), Numbers (spreadsheets), and Keynote (presentations). It's the first version of the software to run on one of Apple's portable devices and makes full use of the iPad's touch screen. Each app is offered separately at $9.99 apiece. There are some practical problems for iPad being a productivity tool. The first hurdle is the keyboard. When it comes to writing long text (essays and report) our fingers crave a real keyboard. Apple's $69 keyboard can be start but may not completely bridge the gap. Users will complain about a missing mouse! Second is, getting files off the iPad isn't as simple as plugging in a thumb drive or burning a CD. You either need to e-mail them or upload them somewhere . Printing a document you've composed on the iPad—is an issue. We may see an elegant solution for this in time, but your best bet at the moment is e-mailing or transferring the document to a printer-equipped computer--not a good solution for printing out airline boarding passes, for instance. Time will tell whether a student can get away with using an iPad as a primary computer? It is here that a Netbook will win!

Conclusions:
Although it won't replace my laptop, at least not yet it remains an awesome family device for “casual computing”. Browsing, photo albums, videos, maps
have never been better!