Finally I got the chance to play first hand with the iPad at a local store here in Eastern Europe. It’s here unofficially, of course, through the gray market. This post won’t be a review but a mere list of my thoughts of the iPad after spending roughly two hours with it.

    I’ve played with it on a WiFi network so I can’t say anything about how the 3G version will fare, plus it will greatly depend on your country GSM network. What had come to my mind in the first few minutes of contact is that the Apple PR photos of their devices seem highly accurate, unlike the ones from other manufacturers, and that’s a good thing. The iPad looks exactly as on Apple’s website. Also, surprisingly, the weight of the device seems more than I would be comfortable to handle all day long. I guess a laptop has the benefit of sitting on the table most of the time.

    Construction

    Is simple as we are all accustomed on Apple products nowadays. The case finish is great, screen is gorgeous but the highly reflective glass layer is something you’ll come to hate as it attracts fingerprints and makes is hard to read in direct sunlight, but if you use the iPad at home that won’t be a problem at all.

    How it performs

    Well, there are few words to describe how well this device handles web pages, launches apps, zooms and pans in Google Maps. It’s instantaneous, that’s the best word to describe it. Of course we’ll have to wait and see how it will do multitasking once iPhone OS 4.0 gets here, but I bet it will be still quicker than all other tablets.

    The interface

    If you had an iPhone you won’t have problems adjusting. If not, the iPad is very intuitive to use, but you have to read the manual to get the tricks, but that’s also true for other gadgets. So no issues here, except selecting text, which seems quite hard to do if you want to highlight specific parts of a paragraph, but maybe that’s just me.

    E-Books

    That’s a nice app. I like so much the way you can turn pages and navigate through your books. The iPad really manages to get closer to the actual reading of a paper book more than any other eBook reader. I’m curious how it fees to read from the screen for a few hours, as eye strain is concerned.

    The keyboard

    Here’s one of my biggest issues with the iPad. A virtual keyboard is no match for a physical one. I simply can’t type nowhere as fast as I do on my laptop. In time I could get faster but it doesn’t feel comfortable at all to me, so a keyboard dock or external keyboard is a must for heavy typists like me.

    What can you do with it?

    I guess that’s the biggest question. I can browse on it quite well with the exception of Flash websites which is a dumb decision by Apple if you ask me. I can read my email, watch some photos and that’s pretty much it. If I were to write a post on my blog there’s no way I can adjust my pictures, convert a video and upload it to Youtube or do any heavy work related stuff like handling large Excel files or opening and editing strange file formats.

    That’s why for now the iPad is just something for rich spoiled kids that want to look cool. It’s of no practical value for me and it doesn’t replace any of my gadgets. For example this post was written on my QWERTY phone comfortably in 20 minutes. I wouldn’t be as fast on the iPad and that’s the bottom line: you can’t be productive on the iPad as it is just a leisure device.