Introduction

Create your own iPad and Iphone Apps

The iPad is the newest device in Apple’s family of touch-based computers. Positioned between a traditional laptop computer and pocket computers like the iPod Touch, nobody seems quite sure how to categorize the iPad. Is it a competitor for low-cost “netbooks?” A big iPod? A new platform? What role, exactly, will it play in our digital lives?

Following months of pre-release discussion and the creation of our detailed iPad FAQ, we purchased the $499 model on the day it arrived at Apple’s stores. iPad in hand, we then spent several days evaluating the system and gathering input from a cross-section of people ranging from traditional Apple enthusiasts to netbook owners to self-described “computer illiterates.”

We found it to be a useful “peripheral computer”, a unique device that complements, rather than replaces, existing computers and smartphones. It also extends Apple’s mobile, touch-based platform, adding even more energy to a vibrant “ecosystem,” which is controlled from top to bottom by Apple but also benefits from the creativity and hard work of a growing army of third-party developers.

Basics

In context of Apple’s products to date, the iPad can be viewed as simply a bigger, faster “iTouch” (i.e. iPod Touch). And we’d say that’s not far off, yet doesn’t tell the whole story. The iPad is 9.5″ tall by 7.5″ wide by 0.5″ thick — roughly the size of a standard pad of paper, but heavier. The 1024×768-pixel screen (9.7″ diagonal) provides more than five times the visual space of an iPhone or iPod Touch. The iPad is too big to carry in a pocket (vs. an iPod Touch), but its screen space lets you do the sorts of task that aren’t practical on a smaller screen: word processing, spreadsheets, diagraming, even photo editing and page layout are possible and practical on iPad.

The first thing you notice, of course, is the device itself. Most people said the iPad was larger than they expected, when we first showed it to them. This wasn’t a negative, just surprise. At 1.5 lbs, the iPad has heft — its glass face and big internal battery make it feel dense. (For comparison, Amazon’s Kindle is less than half the weight, and the iPhone isn’t even a quarter of the iPad’s weight.)

The iPad’s gently-curved back has a similar profile to an iPhone 3G/3GS, but its flat edges are reminiscent of Apple’s unibody MacBooks. Like these devices, the iPad’s curved back makes it easy to pick up one-handed. Its satin-finished aluminum back is pleasant to touch but doesn’t provide much grip.

Its black glass front dominates the iPad’s visual effect. A black bezel (margin) between each edge and the actual screen display offers a place for thumbs to hold the iPad without obscuring pixels. A single Home button graces the front. A power/sleep button is on the top edge, while volume and rotation-hold switches are nearby, on the top-right edge.

A stereo headphone jack and microphone are on the top edge opposite the power button. On the bottom edge, a Dock port is underneath the Home button, and a single speaker opening to its right provides an outlet for two small, stereo speakers inside. The stereo effect is completely lost, but when docked, the iPad’s sound reflects off a table surface and seems to spread out. Its speakers have considerably more volume than a MacBook’s, with excellent clarity, but they lack bass response, and, of course, lack stereo imaging.

The audio output’s sound quality seemed excellent. We tested it with a set of studio reference headphones — there was absolutely no hiss apparent, and sound quality was excellent across the range. No earphones are included by Apple, and the iPad rewards high-quality headphones (unlike some of Apple’s lesser iPods).

The iPad’s screen is, as promised, bright and crisp, and it shows little color shift, even at extreme angles. This is truly a premium display, every bit as good as those in Apple’s expensive MacBook Pro laptops. The glossy glass panel in front of the display both protects it and enhances contrast. Such glossy displays are notorious for reflections, but the bright display makes them practically disappear, if you’re not in strong sunlight. And the iPad is easy to tilt a few degrees if reflections are bothersome. Despite some initial concern, especially after our experience with Apple’s glossy aluminum MacBook (see review), we didn’t find iPad reflections to be an issue. If they do bother you, inexpensive anti-glare films are available, although they reduce sharpness and add a slightly distracting color sparkle.

Setup, Backup and Sync Options

iTunes 9.1 on Mac or Windows is a pre-requisite to set up an iPad, connecting via the device’s dock-USB cable (or an optional iPad USB dock). You also must be running Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) or later; the iPad won’t even talk with iTunes 9.1 on Mac OS X 10.4.

Aside from serving as a media repository (for music, movies, podcasts, photos, audiobooks and ebooks), iTunes also makes backups and controls software (firmware) updates, provides iPad-to-Mac/PC file exchange with selected apps (including Pages, Keynote and Numbers, and some third party apps such as OmniGraffle), and keeps your calendars, contacts, Safari bookmarks and mail account settings in sync with your Mac or PC.

iTunes provides file import/export for some iPad apps:

As with the iPhone and iPod Touch, some wireless sync options are available on the iPad. Apple’s $99/year MobileMe service [discounted at Amazon] provides calendar, contact, bookmark and mail sync with over-the-air “push” updates. MobileMe also provides web hosting, photo and video galleries with optional password restrictions, calendar and contact sharing, and online file storage. The service includes a web-based “Find My iPad” location service, and the ability to erase your iPad remotely, so long as it has network access.

Microsoft Exchange servers, using the ActiveSync protocol, can provide calendar, contact and mail sync with over-the-air “push” updates, as well as remote management and remote wipe features.

Google Gmail and Google Calendar users can avail themselves of Google’s free sync service, which uses ActiveSync to provide similar calendar, contact and mail with “push” updates; Google Apps Premier and Enterprise users also can manage iPhone OS devices, including remote wipe.

Some iPhone and iPad apps use Apple’s notification service to send updates that appear on-screen even if an app is not running. We have found that the WiFi-only iPad, like an iPod Touch, receives these updates about every 15 minutes, rather than within a few seconds, as iPhones do.

Hands-On

Using the iPad is a tactile, intimate experience, as with the iPhone and iPod Touch before it. You directly manipulate the interface: tap icons and buttons, stretch and shrink images and web pages, drag objects around, all with your fingers, not with a proxy pointer like a mouse. Typing with a keyboard (on-screen or physical) is the only indirect exception, excusable since it is both faster and more reliable than handwriting recognition (for phonetic alphabets, at least; the same is not true of some Asian languages).

We found usability of the iPad’s on-screen virtual keyboard varied with the person typing. A teenager accustomed to blazing texts on a non-Apple cell phone found it much easier and faster than typing on an iPod Touch. A touch typist found it frustratingly glitchy vs. a real keyboard, producing all sorts of ghost characters when the screen repeatedly misinterpreted his fingers’ intentions.

Quite a few specialized virtual keyboards are available on-screen (selected via the iPad preference panes), including QWERTY-Japanese and Simplified Chinese Handwriting. Dvorak fans will appreciate iPad’s support for Dvorak physical keyboards, but there is no matching virtual keyboard. The virtual keyboard isn’t really meant for touch typing anyway; although the F and J home keys have visual bumps, they’re not too useful! With practice you can attain fair speed, as on the iPhone; hunt-and-peck typists will be as fast as with a physical keyboard. For the rest of us, though, a physical keyboard is a must-have accessory if you intend to do much writing or note-taking with your iPad.

(Apple sells two keyboards that work with iPad: a custom Keyboard Dock (keyboard and dock combined) with iPad-specific shortcut keys, and its standard wireless keyboard. The Keyboard Dock holds an iPad up in a comfortable position for use while typing. There’s good news on the Bluetooth front, too: early reports are that generic, non-Apple keyboards work with no problems, including the iGo “Stowaway” folding keyboard.)

Apple has redesigned the interface of every app it offers for the big screen — imperfectly, but mostly successfully. Aside from the big home screen, the first things we notice are new interface elements: “popover” menus that appear when you tap buttons and independently-scrolling screen regions. For example, the Settings app has a list of settings down the left, similar to the iPhone/iPod Touch, but adds the detail pane for each setting at right. The left pane scrolls vertically; the right pane scrolls vertically but independently, and it side-scrolls to sub-menus. It’s an odd adaptation of the iPhone’s small screen interface to a big screen, but once you learn it, it works well.

Independent scroll regions in Settings:	ComiXology info panel scrolls, but lacks a visual cue:

A drawback of this design, though, is poor discoverability. With no scroll bars to indicate there is more content outside the current view, there’s no cue to drag and scroll! We see this time after time, in both Apple and third-party apps, and it’s a little uncomfortable in contrast with the original Mac’s crystal-clear interface design.

Still, this is nearly the only misstep we’ve seen; overall the iPad draws on its iPhone heritage effectively. Sheer speed and responsiveness make the iPad a joy to use. Unlike the original iPhone, there is never any lag in switching from app to app, even though most of them must quit and start (tasks which typically take a while on Mac and Windows). All the apps are designed to work in portrait or landscape orientation, and again unlike iPhone, there’s no lag when you turn the screen on its side, or upside down. You turn the iPad, and the screen follows immediately. Any side is up! But you can also lock the screen to one orientation, with the switch on the side of the device, so turning it physically doesn’t reorient the graphics automatically.

Home and Preferences

The iPad’s home screen is its application launcher and organizer. Whatever you’re doing, you can always press the Home button (below, next to, above) the display to return here. A Leopard-style “Dock” sits at the bottom, holding up to six icons; above it is a four-by-five grid of icons. An attractive background image can be replaced with any picture you want. As you add more apps and Safari shortcut icons, the iPad adds more home screens to the right. Just flick left and right to traverse them. The iPad allows up to 11 home screens, for a total of 220 apps and/or web shortcuts, before you run out of space. A few users have found you can exceed this limit; you can’t see the extra icons but you can find them in Spotlight.

Spotlight is a search utility built into the Home screen — just flick left from your first home screen and start typing. The iPad searches your apps, email, notes, contacts, calendars, podcasts, music and videos, and shows results as you type. Unfortunately, third-party apps don’t work with Spotlight (the way they do on Mac Spotlight).

Spotlight searches all the built-in apps, but not ones from the App Store

The iPad’s locked screen adds a new control missing from iPhone and iPod touch: a small icon of a flower in a frame. Touch it to start a slideshow, turning your iPad into a digital photo frame. By default it shuffles through all your photos, but in Settings you can select specific photo albums, Faces or Events to use. From the lock screen, you also can double-press the home button to bring up iPod playback and volume controls and even change the audio output (e.g., from speakers to bluetooth headphones).

Apple’s Settings app configures a variety of system-wide options and app-specific options, including mail accounts, Safari settings, backgrounds and screen brightness, and more. Apple’s original iPhone model put settings for all apps here, but then Apple muddied the waters by having some apps (mostly the small ones, like Stocks and Weather) put their settings in their own app instead. Third party apps were divided, with some adhering to Apple’s recommendation to use the Settings app and others handling settings inside the app. Apple, too, seems to be migrating settings inside apps. Yet some third-party apps still use the Settings App. As a result, figuring out where to change an app’s behavior is its own challenge. Apple should just kick the few remaining apps out of Settings, including their own, and have it simply manage the iPad itself.

Apple Accessories

Apple includes a USB-dock cable and AC adapter for that cable in the iPad box. Apple offers several optional accessories for the iPad, as well, including an iPad Dock, a VGA cable, a case, a Keyboard Dock (combining a dock with an attached keyboard), and a Camera Connector Kit.

The $29 iPad Dock is small but solid, wide and deep enough to provide a stable base for the iPad, but the iPod must be positioned in portrait orientation – it doesn’t work in landscape orientation. A 30-pin dock port on the rear connects with Apple’s cable, so you can charge or sync while docked, and a stereo mini-jack provides line-level audio output. Unlike the Apple Universal Dock, however, it offers no infrared sensor for Apple’s remote control.

Apple’s $29 VGA adapter enables some iPad apps to send graphics to many monitors and projectors at 1024×768 (XGA) resolution. Although promoted for use with Keynote, we also found it provided great video quality for movies, TV shows, and even YouTube.

The $39 iPad Case provides protection from scuffs and scratches and folds back to either stand iPad up on its long edge for watching videos or prop it up at an angle suitable for typing on the virtual keyboard. We found it a little wobbly in the upright orientation. The case is made of some matte black, faintly textured material that provides a better grip than the iPad’s aluminum back. Though clearly of high precision manufacture, it somehow still feels cheap. Amazon’s $29 Kindle case, by contrast, provides much more protection and is made of real leather but weighs only a few ounces and adds little bulk. Nor does the Apple iPad Case work with the Apple iPad Dock — unless you trim the case with a knife! We expected a little more for something with Apple’s logo on it. At least this lesson only cost us $39 plus sales tax plus expedited shipping charges.

Apple iPad Case in typing position:	Apple iPad Case in watching position:	The rear tab is annoying to insert:

Apple’s $69 Keyboard Dock arrived on our doorstep just before this review went to publication. It looks much like the Apple Wireless Keyboard but has several iPad-specific shortcut keys: The top left key opens the Home screen; the next key goes directly to Spotlight. Brightness controls are next, then a slideshow key that activates the Lock screen’s photo mode! Next is a key to show or hide the on-screen virtual keyboard. The center key is unused. A set of iTunes playback and volume controls are next, like on Apple’s more recent Macbooks and compact keyboards. Finally, the top-right key puts the iPad to sleep, or wakes it up and bypasses the lock screen.

The Keyboard Dock seems meant to live on a table or desk; its vertical support for an iPad adds more bulk than is convenient for other purposes. Highly mobile users may prefer Apple’s more compact wireless keyboard, despite its lack of iPad shortcut keys.

Keyboard Dock in use:	Viewed from behind:

The $29 Camera Connection Kit is not yet available; Apple says it is coming in “Late April”.

Apple Apps and Stores

Apps from Apple for the iPad can be roughly divided into three categories: entertainment, productivity, and stores for buying content and more apps. All combine utility, usability and pleasurable (even whimsical) design effectively.

Entertainment

iPod

“iPod” (a hardware ancestor of the iPad) is the name Apple gave the iPad’s app for playing music, audiobooks, and podcasts. As recreated virtually for the iPad, “iPod” looks like iTunes on a Mac or PC: content sources and playlists are on the left, content on the right, with big play/pause and forward/back buttons and a finger-friendly volume slider at the top. Also like iTunes, the album art of the currently playing song is shown at lower left.

However, that’s about as far as the iTunes similarities go. There’s no CoverFlow, no Internet Radio, no iTunes library sharing, no AirTunes, no music visualizers.

But, unlike its iPhone and iPod Touch siblings, you can create new playlists on this iPad iPod. Tap the + button at lower right, enter a name for your new playlist, and start adding songs. (iPhone/iPod Touch users will realize this is essentially “On The Go” playlist creation optimized for a larger screen.) Of course, Genius Mixes and Genius Playlists are available too.

If there’s not enough space on the iPad for your entire media library, iTunes 9.1 on your companion computer offers to fill it with a selection of your music while the iPad is connected. While earlier versions of iTunes would do this (for iPods and iPhones) by creating a new playlist and using that as the source, iTunes 9.1 instead just adds music to the iPad until it’s full. (After syncing your other media and apps.) It leaves a couple hundred megabytes of free space to ensure that there is still room to add a few apps, download mail, etc. If storage is at a premium, iTunes 9.1 has an option to convert your music to 128-Kbps AAC on the way to the iPad, saving space. (This is half the size of iTunes Plus and Amazon MP3 downloads, while retaining much of the audio quality.)

When browsing in iTunes, genres and albums flip over to show you their songs	Creating a playlist, which later will sync back to your Mac or PC	Browsing podcasts

Videos

Like the iPod Touch, and unlike the iPhone, the iPad has a separate Videos app for your movies, TV shows, and any other videos you may have added to your Mac or PC iTunes library. The iPad provides a very nice interface for movies and TV shows purchased from the iTunes Store; artwork, plot summaries, and chapters are all available. Videos you’ve added to iTunes yourself show only technical data about the video size and format, but if your ripper adds chapter markers, they will appear.

The playback experience is excellent. The iPad’s LED-lit IPS display has excellent contrast, black level and color saturation, without the distorted or blown-out color common to less expensive panels. The built-in speakers aren’t great but they are sufficient for watching video in a quiet room. As on the iPhone and iPod Touch, the iPad scales video to fit its screen. The 4:3 aspect ratio means movies and TV shot for HD will be letterboxed, but you can tap a zoom button to fill the screen, cropping the sides off.

The iPad is limited to just a few video formats: H.264, MPEG-4 and Motion-JPEG in AVI. This limitation conserves battery life, as video decoding and playback is handled by dedicated graphics hardware. H.264 has become the most widely-used video compression scheme online today; even most Flash video uses H.264 underneath the interface. M-JPEG in an AVI wrapper used by many digital cameras to record short video clips.

Movie from iTunes Store with chapter markers	TV show from iTunes Store with full plot summaries

YouTube

A dedicated YouTube app provides most of the same basic functionality as YouTube’s website, except it’s faster, easier to navigate, and ad-free! You can login to YouTube, access your favorites, subscriptions and playlists; rate and comment on videos; mark favorites; browse related videos, and, of course, search.

Videos play at the highest quality available, except for 1080 HD. We’ve found YouTube’s 1080 offerings to be disappointingly fuzzy on both Macs and PCs, so we don’t really consider this a loss, besides which, 1080 would be wasted on the iPad’s smaller, 1024×768 pixel display.

YouTube today offers video quality that is both technically and subjectively superior to what was being broadcast five years ago, before the digital HD transition. And on iPad, it looks fantastic.

YouTube in full screen with playback controls	YouTube with video info and related content

Photos

Rounding out Apple’s entertainment apps is Photos, which is in the Home screen dock by default (you can move it out to make room for other items if you wish). Photos for iPad is pretty much the same in function as it is on the iPhone and iPod Touch but with much nicer presentation. Instead of a list of albums, and inside them a dense grid of tiny icons, Photos on iPad offers you five views to explore: Photos, Albums, Events, Faces, Places.

• “Photos” is a traditional grid of thumbnails, generously spaced and large enough to easily distinguish each photo from the next. All the photos on your iPad are shown in this view.
• “Albums”, “Events” and “Faces” each shows you stacks of photos, arranged neatly on a grid and organized by type. Here’s where the fun starts: use an un-pinch gesture on a stack and it spreads out to preview. Keep stretching it and the stack explodes to fill the screen in another neat grid of photos. Pinch shut to put the stack back in place, or pinch open another picture to view a zoom preview. As before, keep stretching to zoom to full screen, or release to let it snap closed again. It’s simple, elegant, and fun.
• “Places” brings up a map view with pins for the geotagged locations of your photos. Tap a pin for a preview; multiple photos show as a stack. Pinch it apart to preview or explode the stack. Like the Albums, Events and Faces view, this is a fun way to explore (or show off) your travels or far-flung family’s photos!

Faces and Places are available only to Mac users of iPhoto or Aperture, which provides the appropriate person or geotag metadata to iTunes as it loads the iPad with photos.

Photos shows Albums, Events and Faces as stacks of photos you can expand:	Places shows a map with pins for every geo-tagged photo; here we’ve zoomed in to a local park:

Productivity Apps

Turning next to “productivity” tools, we again see apps evolved and expanded from their iPhone/iPod Touch incarnations. Calendar and Contacts in particular show significant changes.

Calendar

The Calendar was iPad’s biggest surprise for us — because it is startlingly useful. Apple’s iCal on the Mac platform suffers from embarrassingly poor usability, mysteriously worsening with each iteration of Mac OS X, while Calendar on the iPhone has always been limited by its small screen.

iCal on the Mac offers basic functionality, but entering event details is painfully slow, with many different fields to set. Some fields allow only keyboard input, others only mouse input, and some require both — leading to an awkward dance between keyboard and mouse. Scheduling with iCal is a chore.

The iPhone version has as many fields, but they are far, far faster to set. Only the iPhone’s small screen makes it ineffective — great for adding new events or accepting invitations but not an efficient way to look at your overall schedule.

The iPad’s Calendar builds on the usability of the iPhone’s calendar and has a very pleasant visual design. Apple designed this Calendar to look like a paper desk calendar, with spiral-bound flip pages and tear-off day pages. There is even a little ragged remnant of a previous torn-off page sticking to the top of the calendar pad. In fact, they look so good that, with Apple’s checkered iCal past, we feared style had been put ahead of substance. This turned out not to be the case at all!

This new Calendar offers four views of your schedule: Day, Week, Calendar and List. Each is thoughtfully designed and clear.

Day view looks like a bound appointment book, showing two pages per day. On the left-hand page are details of each of the day’s events: title, start and end times, who created the event, invitees and description. You can tap an event to edit it using a popover. On the right-hand page is a traditional hour-by-hour view, providing a good idea of where you have free time. A mini-calendar for the current month graces the upper right; tap a day to jump to it. Pages flip left or right as you change days.

Week view looks like a paper tablet with a week’s events, hour-by-hour. Tap an event to show its details in a popover; an edit button shows the editor, which looks and acts much like the iPhone’s efficient calendar tool, with the addition of prominent buttons to accept, refuse or “maybe” an invitation, when you are the invitee.

Month view is much like week view: a paper tablet, traditional grid view, tap for details. You don’t have to tap each event separately; just drag your finger across events and their details appear as you pass over them. Again, like week view, tap the edit button to make changes.

List view is our favorite, and shows that Apple has finally thought through how calendars are used. Most scheduling software to date has provided a fair day view, but for schedule overviews, has emulated the traditional large paper calendar grid on a small, low-resolution screen. That turns out to be not very effective. The degenerate case is the last day of the month, where the calendar uses most of its space on past events which are no longer relevant, uses one-thirtieth of the space for today (at best), and leaves no space at all for upcoming days. Practically, an overview should show today in great detail, the next few days in moderate detail, and the past not at all.

The iPad’s List view accomplishes this goal with panache and style. At left, a spiral-bound pad provides a scrollable list of events. At right, a paper tablet shows details for the currently selected event from the list (which defaults to whatever is happening now) and an hour-by-hour view of your commitments and free time. Tap any event to update the detail pane; tap the Edit button to bring up the same popover editor used elsewhere. It is simple, clear and devastatingly effective. Our hat’s off to Apple on this one.

Calendar’s List view shows all upcoming events, the day’s commitments, and notes about the selected event.

Contacts

The Contacts app also gets a visual makeover for the iPad; it looks like a finely-bound address book. The left page has a list of names, and at the edge is an alphabet, like those printed and embossed into paper address books. Tap a letter to jump to that part of the book. A ribbon bookmark in the upper corner opens to your address groups, which are either synced from the Mac Address Book, Outlook Groups, or your enterprise directory server.

When you tap the edit button on a contact, the book slides to the left and centers the contact information on the page, where you edit it in place. Tap “done”, and the book slides back into place so you can browse the list again.

Unlike most of the other built-in apps, Contacts doesn’t take full advantage of portrait orientation. The vertical style simply has narrower pages and big black blocks of unused space above and below. When you edit a contact, the page doesn’t even expand to provide as much width as in landscape view. Apple’s designers took the visual metaphor a step too far here, giving up valuable screen space for aesthetics at the expense of function.

Notes

The classic yellow lined note pad design came with the iPhone in 2007 and has remained relatively unchanged until now. The iPad’s big screen and on-screen keyboard, though, give Notes a lot more potential uses than before. It also is a lot more stylish: turn the iPad to landscape orientation, and Notes reveals itself as a sumptuous leather-clad note pad, with a list of your note pages down the left (and the active page circled in red pencil).

Notes retains the same love-it-or-hate-it MarkerFelt text face as iPhone. That worked fine on the small screen for short amounts of text, but it has poor readability for large blocks of text. It would be helpful to be able to pick a different typeface.

Notes, in landscape view, after a test subject tried out the on-screen keyboard.

As with iPhone and iPod Touch, iTunes can sync your notes to Mac Mail or Outlook on Windows.

Mail

Email is an essential Internet activity for many users, and Apple has kept its Mail app simple and streamlined. Mail can be a little frustrating for “power users”, however — it supports multiple accounts but has no unified inbox; it searches messages, but only their subject lines, sender and recipients; it displays rich HTML messages, but can’t compose them. And your Internet provider better provide good junk mail filtering, because Mail hasn’t got any of its own. It’s no more a full-on email system than the iPhone’s, because it won’t hold more than 200 messages per mailbox.

But if you just want to compose and reply to messages with no fuss or muss, the iPad’s Mail app works fine. In landscape mode, the left quarter of the screen shows your message list, and the right-hand side shows messages. When you tap the Edit button at the top of the message list and start selecting messages, each one is added to a stack at right. Pick a destination mailbox, and the stack jumps into it. Little touches like this abound in Mail. What it does, it does very well.

Landscape view is useful for managing messages, and rapidly scanning your inbox:	Portrait view uses a “popover” to show mailbox contents on demand:

Maps

When Steve Jobs introduced the iPad in January, he sailed through Google Maps with a brief view of the Eiffel Tower and moved on. That’s because, aside from a much larger screen, and an option to show the turn list on top of maps with trip directions, there isn’t a lot different from the iPhone/iPod Touch version.

The iPad’s big screen shows off Google Street View to great effect, though, and map overviews are more like having a paper map. But that’s largely it. These days the real action in mapping is in found at the App Store, with dozens of GPS-enabled navigation apps, custom map apps like CalQuakes, and even GIS tools like iGIS, GIS.Data and Field Assets. We look forward to seeing this class of apps evolve for the iPad.

Apple’s Three Stores

The last of the bundled Apple apps are the iTunes Store and App Store. If you download iBooks from the App Store, you then gain access to a third store, the iBooks Store. Although each deals in different media, they all look and work the same. If you’ve shopped the iTunes Store on the Mac’s iTunes 9 application, you’ll be right at home on the iPad. Editor’s picks are on the main pages, and you can browse popular content by category or top-seller lists. Beyond that, search replaces browsing — type in a word or phrase to find content of interest.

The iTunes Store sells music, music videos, audiobooks, TV shows and movies, and it also provides a directory of free podcasts. Content that you buy on your iPad can be transferred to your Mac or PC via iTunes on the big computer — except for movie rentals, which can’t leave your iPad! (Since Apple also offers rentals on AppleTV, this is a puzzling restriction.)

The App Store has more than 150,000 apps that run on the iPad. iPhone/iPod Touch apps run in a window in the center of the iPad’s screen, at actual size. A “2X” button in the corner doubles their size, but they will look blocky in that mode. (It’s a little like watching a VHS tape on an HDTV; the low resolution of the original is exaggerated on the big screen.) This beats doing nothing, but we did replace as many iPhone apps as possible with their newer iPad equivalents as quickly as we could. Happily, many developers are releasing free updates to their apps, designed to work on both iPhone and iPad in each device’s native screen size. (These are often called “universal” apps in Apple developer jargon.)

Apple’s advertising slogan is “There’s an app for that”, and that’s no exaggeration. The App Store has a long tail of niche apps — although major brands dominate the top-selling lists, there is an app for nearly every conceivable interest (except for prurient ones, which Apple has recently excised from the App Store). Despite developers having just ten weeks to take iPad apps from concept to completion, a staggering number of iPad apps were for sale on the App Store on launch day. Most are iPad-optimized variants of existing iPhone apps, but some are all-new.

The iPad price point for apps looks to be $9.99 at the moment, with apps priced higher than that being “premium” apps in some sense (or at least pretending to be) and with fewer $0.99 apps than we saw for the iPhone. But iPhone app pricing went through a lot of shifting in the first couple of months while developers tried to figure out the market, and we expect to see something similar happen with iPad apps.

The iBooks Store is Apple’s latest venture into digital media sales. Treading in Amazon’s Kindle footsteps, the store has a moderate selection from five major and many small publishers. As with the Kindle, brief samples are available (it’s a bit like reading the first ten or twelve pages of a book while standing in a bookstore).

Book prices are set by the publishers; Apple takes a 30% distribution fee (as with apps). So far, we’ve found some books priced lower than Amazon’s Kindle versions, but most are a little higher. Some 30,000 free books from Project Gutenberg are available here too — they don’t show up in the editors’ picks, but if you search, they appear (sometimes side-by-side with commercial versions of the same content; for an example, search for “Mark Twain”).

“DRM”, or copy protection, is an issue with iBooks. In contrast to Kindle books, books from the iBooks store can only be read on the iPad device, and they are locked to your iTunes account, just like movies and TV shows from the iTunes Store. In theory Apple could create an iBooks app for Mac or Windows, but we’re not sure they will. iBooks looks great, but lacking any promises from Apple not to abandon customers and their purchases if the iBooks Store isn’t a commercial success, we’re wary.

iWork Apps

Separate from the Apple apps bundled with the iPad are Apple’s extra-cost apps, the iWork trio — Pages, Numbers and Keynote — more advanced apps designed to showcase the unique capabilities of the iPad’s larger format and to integrate, via iTunes, with the iWork suite running on Mac OS X. On the iPad, Pages, Keynote and Numbers are priced at $9.99 each at the iTunes App Store. These iWork apps do not run on the smaller iPhone and iPod Touch devices, despite sharing Apple’s multi-touch platform. See our separate iWork Apps Review for all the details.

Performance

What is “fast?” Megahertz? FLOPS? MIPS? Traditional Mac and PC benchmarking doesn’t apply to handheld devices, not just because they don’t run the same software, but because they don’t do the same things.

Practically speaking, “fast” means “no waiting.” And the iPad experience is fluid and responsive; the only times we have ever had wait for something to happen have been for network-dependent actions — fetching email, loading web pages, maps or weather data, etc.

iPhone developer Craig Hockenberry has published some performance benchmarks comparing the iPhone 3GS and iPad (see Links at the end of this review). The iPad averages a little more than twice as fast as the already-fast iPhone 3GS. This extra speed not only means current iPad and iPhone applications are responsive, it also provides extra headroom for new apps to do more. It’s also good news for gamers, and early iPad games are showing well. Mirror’s Edge, for example, renders a 3D environment at 1024×768 pixels and never drops a frame, without noticeably affecting battery life. Not bad for just 2.5 watts of power! And the iPad generates no heat to speak of. Even running a game like Mirror’s Edge for half an hour, the aluminum housing remained cool to the touch.

Mirror’s Edge, a 3D platformer (based on the parkour game of the same name) uses touch gestures to control gameplay

While the iPad is very power-efficient, it doesn’t hurt that it has a huge battery inside. Two lithium-polymer cells provide a 25 watt-hour capacity; for comparison, the iPhone 3GS has a 4.5 watt-hour battery. Apple claims a 10-hour battery life. Those with early access to iPad hardware report that it actually exceeds this by a good margin, and our experience matches this — unless Bluetooth is in use. Typing continuously on Apple’s Bluetooth keyboard, while playing music over a stereo Bluetooth headset, cut this nearly in half!

Under the Hood

Apple tells the world that the iPad is powered by the Apple-designed, 1-GHz chip. What this means, exactly, has been a matter of speculation for months. But, thanks to iFixit’s traditional first-day teardown and their partner ChipWorks’ analysis of the A4 chip, the Apple community now has some educated guesses.

The A4 is a “package on package” three-layer design. Its first layer is the core processor, which appears to be based on the ARM Cortex A8 design, with the PowerVR SGX graphics processor on the same piece of silicon. The second and third layers are two memory chips; being literally stacked on top of the CPU means lower latency and less power required. The same Cortex A8 and PowerVR SGX are used by the iPhone 3GS but with slower clock speeds, not integrated, and with external memory and support chips.

The A4 is a conservative design, not a radical jump forward. Since it is Apple’s first foray into custom CPUs, we’re perfectly happy with this approach (as we don’t enjoy being crash test dummies).

Rugged Construction

Structurally, the iPad uses the same manufacturing process as Apple’s MacBook Air and “unibody” MacBook/MacBook Pro models. The iPad’s rear panel is actually machined from a solid block of aluminum. If you pry open an iPad, you’ll see stepped ridges machined into the panel, adding torsional rigidity. The front glass panel (the same high-strength optical-grade glass as the iPhone’s) is about 20% thicker than the iPhone’s; this keeps it from flexing under the greater moment arm created by iPad’s greater size.

iFixit located this image from Apple’s FCC approvals submission:

How tough is an iPad? Reference this YouTube video of an iPad smashed by a baseball bat. Being dropped didn’t have much effect, and the first few whacks to the aluminum shell with a bat didn’t do much either. Not until they started smashing the glass, and then sent it flying through the air, did it finally start to come apart. The abuse this iPad sustained before destruction is truly remarkable. (And apalling.)

Issues

Unsurprisingly, for a brand new product, the iPad isn’t without its issues. Some are basic design issues — like its physical incompatibility with the increasingly-misnamed “Apple Universal dock” — while others are purely software problems, and hence may be correctable with updates.

Wireless Issues

iPad is prone to weak WiFi, with intermittent connection problems. This might be the metal shell’s fault (like the early “Titanium” PowerBook G4), or it might be a software or firmware problem that possibly could be fixed with a software update.

Whatever the cause, it can be maddening: where other devices, such as an iPhone, experience a slightly lower signal strength, the iPad often drops out completely. Sometimes the signal strength indicator in the status bar doesn’t even show the degradation — network connections simply become slow or fail completely despite two or three bars of signal. It doesn’t seem to matter whether the iPad is using 802.11g or using 802.11n on the 5 GHz spectrum.

iFixit’s teardown shows that the WiFi and Bluetooth antennas are behind the black plastic Apple logo on the rear panel — the same design used successfully in Apple’s current iMacs. In theory, this ought to work well. From the Titanium PowerBook G4 to the original iPhone, Apple has had its share of embarrassingly poor antenna designs, but a blatant problem like this on a brand new product is a real black eye.

Bluetooth, too, is glitchy, though not as troublesome as WiFi. When using stereo bluetooth headphones, sometimes the iPod app would drop the headphone connection and start playing music on the internal speaker instead. Only turning the headphones off, then back on, restored proper audio routing.

While writing this review, using Pages on the iPad, the Apple Wireless Keyboard frequently would repeat a key (like sooooooooooooo). We thought it might be old batteries, but a fresh pair didn’t improve matters. Eventually we figured out that this only happened when also using Bluetooth stereo headphones simultaneously to listen to music. We’ve used the keyboard and headphones in the same way with Macs, however, with no such trouble in the past, so the iPad itself appears to be the culprit.

Accessories

While the iPad uses the standard Apple 30-pin “Dock” port connector, almost all existing docks are sized for iPods, and the iPad simply won’t fit into them. This means that few, if any, iPod accessories will work; Apple’s own “Apple Universal Dock” is right out. Conversely, the $29 iPad Dock isn’t useful with most iPods, because its dock connector is so close to the back-support piece that only iPod Nanos fit in it.

Charging is confusing, too. The iPad’s huge battery requires a lot of current to charge in a reasonable timeframe. The dock port draws USB power, but USB is limited to 500 milliamps — enough to run the iPad, but not to charge the battery at the same time. The iPad will charge via USB when sleeping, but slowly — at roughly 40% the speed of the iPad’s AC charger. Newer Macs, including most 2009 models, can supply the extra current iPad requires.

The net effect on accessories is that most auto and AC chargers will appear not to work, because when the iPad is on, the battery status says “Not Charging”. They only charge when the display is off. With no way to confirm charging except to wait a while, most users will conclude their chargers don’t work.

Worst are unpowered USB hubs and under-powered PC USB ports. If a USB port doesn’t supply at least 500 milliamps, it can actually drain iPad’s battery!

Another minor irritation: There is no way to adjust a physical keyboard’s key repeat rate and delay. We like a short delay and fast repeat, but the iPad seems to have the same settings (long delay, medium repeat) as Mac OS X’s default. There is no keyboard battery status either; the first sign your batteries are low is slow typing, key dropout and occasionally losing and immediately regaining connection (and losing a word or four of typing).

Finally, an entire class of rather important accessories is missing in action: Printers. Despite Apple’s Pages app having beautiful templates for invitations, thank-you notes, fliers, term papers and other designs suitable only for print, there’s no way to get them to paper without adding a Mac or PC onto the process. What a pain.

(There are printing apps in the App Store, but due to the iPhone OS’s security model, they have no way to access Pages documents.)

Stability

Stability is an issue, primarily for third-party apps. Many crash — some a little, others a lot. The blame for this can be laid directly at Apple’s feet, because only a privileged handful outside of Apple have actually had iPad hardware to test in the past few months! Developers could only test on the iPad Simulator provided by Apple, and that simulator doesn’t really share the same behavior as a real iPad. Apps can run fine in simulation but crash badly on the actual iPad hardware.

The simulator runs Intel-architecture machine code, but the iPad uses ARM-architecture machine code. This means that while developers can find and fix logic bugs in their code, without an iPad, they can’t find and debug more subtle architecture-dependent bugs. Quite a few apps also simply use too much memory, and crash ungracefully when they run out. This is usually a result of poor application design and testing only in the simulator’s relatively high-memory environment.

Even Apple’s own apps exhibited a few glitches in our testing. For example, once Mail’s message viewer pane froze up and became unresponsive, yet we could still flick the message list up and down, and change mailboxes. We also saw a spurious out-of-memory error in the Home screen immediately after switching the iPad’s language from English to German.

All of these issues are correctable in software, and we expect third party apps in particular to improve rapidly, now that developers have iPad hardware at last. Until then, early adopters are in for a rocky experience.

Multi-touch Mobile Platform

The iPad is, nominally, a tablet computer — a category that many companies, including Apple, have tried and failed to popularize. Apple introduced the Newton MessagePad in 1993, but five years and six models later, shut down the program with Steve Jobs’s return to the company. Microsoft introduced “Windows for Pen Computing”, an add-on for Windows 3.11, in the early 90’s; again for Windows 95, and yet again in 2002, renamed “Windows XP Tablet PC Edition”. A Linux-based product, “ProGear”, was created by FrontPath, but both the product and the software are no longer developed. Nokia has tried again and again with its Linux-based N-series “Internet Tablets”.

In the Mac space, Axiotron developed the “ModBook”, which replaces the keyboard, trackpad and screen of an Apple MacBook with a new display and Wacom pen digitizer. (Other World Computing, a MacInTouch sponsor, provides ModBook conversion sales and service in the US.) Mac OS X’s built-in “Inkwell” technology — itself originally from the Newton — provides handwriting recognition for the ModBook.

Into this vacuum came the iPhone and iPod Touch. The original iPhone, introduced in 2007, not only revolutionized the mobile phone industry, but introduced the first genuinely new user interface since the Mac in 1984. The iPhone was the first computer you actually manipulated directly with your fingers. Want to look down a page? Don’t scroll a mouse wheel, just push the page around. Want to make a picture bigger? Don’t go looking for a magnifying glass in a toolbar, just grab it and stretch it with two fingers. No more proxies. The computer was finally, truly personal.

Originally a limited-function device, providing just phone, web browsing, email and iPod music playback, the iPhone evolved rapidly as a computing platform. Over the following three years, Apple introduced the iPod Touch computer, added major new features via software updates (free for iPhone owners; at a nominal charge to iPod Touch owners), opened the platform to third-party developers with a wildly-successful, Apple-controlled app store, and upgraded the product line’s hardware annually with ever-better devices. Apple has become synonymous with mobile computing, and its multi-touch computing devices are now as numerous as its Mac computers in the market.

Apple Ecosystem

Apple has cultivated a vibrant, yet tightly-controlled, ecosystem of hardware and software for its multi-touch platform. Developing good software for iPhone and iPod Touch requires a very different user interface model vs. the click-and-menu models of most other mobile platforms. As developers become skilled in creating rich multi-touch interfaces, they tie their work closely to Apple’s platform — multi-touch doesn’t translate well to menu-driven interfaces. And technical issues aside, the only (official) way to publish software for the platform is through Apple’s App Store, where Apple reviews each and every app before allowing it to be distributed.

The iPod/iPhone ecosystem has plenty of hardware, too. Cases are available in every color and style conceivable, from cheap plastic to, literally, diamond-studded. iPod-compatible auto chargers can be had at nearly any convenience store. iPod speaker systems range from bedside radio/alarm clocks to $10 Woot.com specials to thousand-dollar avante-garde designs to toilet paper roll speakers (sadly, we’re not kidding about that last one). Entire sections of car stereo catalogs are dedicated to integrating iPhones and iPods, and auto manufacturers are including iPod connectivity as a standard feature. If you buy an iPod or iPhone, you’ve got options.

Although occasionally frustrating for developers, Apple’s walled garden has resulted in an outstandingly successful consumer experience and bodes very well for iPad.

Outside the Apple Ecosystem

Although Apple has created a new experience in the multi-touch platform, not everyone wants to do it precisely Apple’s way. With little delay, independent developers found ways to “jailbreak” the iPhone and iPod Touch software, bypassing its security controls, so they could create and install their own software.

The developer community has created distribution systems to make installing jailbreak software nearly as quick and easy as Apple’s own App Store products. Cydia and Rock even provide e-commerce services for developers that sell software especially for jailbroken devices.

Often, this software provides functionality that Apple does not allow official developers to create. Examples include blocking certain incoming phone numbers, personal firewalls to filter outgoing internet traffic, customizing the lock screen with mail, calendar and SMS notifications, and simply adding wallpaper to the Home screen or replacing Apple’s icons with new ones.

iPhone hackers have also unlocked the iPhone’s phone carrier restriction to AT&T, not only giving US users the option to use T-Mobile instead of AT&T, but also creating a thriving grey market in jailbroken, unlocked iPhones that sell abroad. And this also gives AT&T customers the option of buying inexpensive local service when traveling abroad.

Whether or not one approves of the jailbreak and unlock projects, it’s clear that Apple has produced a series of devices as compelling to tinkerers and hackers today as the Apple II was three decades ago. And while it’s not yet possible to develop iPad apps on an iPad — a stage that many developers consider to be the hallmark of a mature platform — we recall that the Macintosh’s original software development system required a Lisa computer.

Conclusions

The iPad, today, is a “peripheral computer” — a highly portable, touch-based, but limited-capability tablet. It is designed to be a companion to a larger, traditional personal computer that provides printing, software updates, media storage, backup and other services that are missing from the mobile tablet.

But, conceptually, the iPad is a blank canvas. The big screen becomes whatever it needs to be. It’s a transformative experience, and it enables the iPad to be something that the iPhone and iPod Touch never could be — a creator’s tool.

The iPad also expands Apple’s touch-based ecosystem, which is a distinct alternative to a Mac platform that looks almost moribund in comparison to an exciting and expanding catalog of multi-touch “apps” that grows bigger and more creative every day.

Depending on what you need, the iPad might serve a big iPod Touch — its expansive screen providing apps with much more capability — or it could be a MacBook Air substitute, providing practical (if limited) productivity tools in a far less expensive package.

The iPad could serve as an adjunct to your current computer collection for many purposes — for a child’s entertainment and education, for quick Web lookups, for email, for organizing thoughts, for reading books and viewing videos… and for doing other interesting tasks of many different kinds, supported by creative app developers now and in the future.

Apple’s upcoming 3G model could further change the game, combining the power of ubiquitous Internet connectivity with the iPad’s unique portability for such new applications as field data collection, mobile reporting, navigation, and much more. (We hope to review that new device, too, when Apple begins shipping it around the end of April. We hope it has better WiFi performance, in spite of its 3G capability.)

Should you buy an iPad? If you’ve ever had a moment where you wanted some information from the web but it wasn’t convenient, or wanted to show someone your digital photos without having to pull out a laptop, or you’ve wanted to get some work done but left your heavy laptop behind, then the iPad might be for you.

If you need all the functionality of a traditional personal computer, from printing to programming to expandable storage — and you don’t already have it — a conventional Mac laptop (or desktop) computer is the only answer. But the Apple multi-touch ecosystem is starting to change even these limits. The App Store includes several WiFi printing apps, a full PHP developer environment (Mides IDE) and a general purpose source code editor (Code Monkey). Even storage is being addressed: the recently released AirStash streams movies and music from an SD card to iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch over its own built-in WiFi hotspot.

Is the iPad the technophobe’s computer? Well, not yet. It still requires a Mac or PC to set up, and it expects to be a satellite to iTunes on that Mac or PC, which can store lots more media content and provide backup and software update services to the iPad. But we’re seeing baby steps away from that dependency — for example, Apple will help you set up your iPad before you even leave the store, and after that, iPad can stand alone, as long as you don’t need something like an update or external storage.

When we reviewed the iPhone in 2007, we wrote:

“This well-conceived, direct-manipulation model of interaction is iPhone’s secret weapon. The screen interface is beautiful, but that’s merely the frosting on the cake. We believe that iPhone is just a taste of things to come. Proxy interaction is dead — Windows and Mac just don’t know it yet.”

The iPad, limited in scope and function today just as the Macintosh was in its early days, is taking aim at traditional Mac and PC paradigms. Looking back, it took almost a decade for the Apple II series to die after the Mac was created, and DOS remained the underpinning of most PCs for almost a decade after the successful launch of Windows 3.0 in 1991. Today, Multi-touch is the future. Domination won’t be immediate. But it is inevitable.