[dmaul1114]

My girlfriend caved and bought an 32GB iPad yesterd and we played around with it a lot last night and this morning and I really like it. It's very slick device.

While it is really a big iPhone, the bigger screen makes a TON of difference. I was never very enamored with the iPhone/iPod Touch as the screens just too small to read, surf the net, watch video etc. With the iPad, that's not an issue and it's great at all those tasks.

Some impressions by area:

Web Surfing

It's a damn good "surf the net on the couch" machine. Drawbacks are lack of flash and no keyboard so forums are out. But I prefer sitting and reading news etc. on it vs. my laptop as the form factor is much better for that.

Lack of Flash is the big downer, but sites like ESPN I expected not to work did--videos even played. Did run into some videos that wouldn't play, and of course some facebook games that wouldn't work obviously etc. But it wasn't as big a drawback as I was expecting.

Video

Youtube, the ABC.com episode player and the Netflix streaming app all worked great. Fast, great picture quality etc.

Reading

The ibooks app is very slick. The Kindle app isn't as slick, but still very good. Turn down the brightness and it's very easy on the eyes. It's not e-ink, so people who read for hours on end should stick with their Kindle's etc., but I could give up my Kindle for an iPad for reading for sure since I seldom read for more than an hour at a time, and didn't notice much eye strain reading on here both in these apps, apps like USA Today and NY Times etc.

PDFs

Took a while to figure out how to get PDFs on the device. My g/f bought the 99 cent Good Reader program and we figured out how to drag and drop PDFs into it in iTunes, as well as how to download them from safari (let it load, then type a "g" in front of the web address--in front of http: and it will download it into good reader).

The program works very well and PDFs are very readable. As expected 2 column letter sized pdfs are pretty small too read in portrait. Landscape mode fixes that and the scrolling isn't as annoying as I thought since it's fast and smooth compared to scrolling on a laptop etc.

The iAnnotate program looks great as well, but my g/f hasn't bought it as she didn't want to spend $7 on it right now as she doesn't care as much about annotating as I do and wants to wait a bit and see if more apps come out etc. But it looks promising for my needs.

Other documents

She downloaded the Pages app. Works well for reading word docs. Can type too, but a pain without a keyboard. Can export to word, text and pdf.

Comics

Tried out the Marvel app. I'm not a comic fan but wanted to see how they looked. In a word comics look pretty stunning.


Overall, I'm very impressed. Very slick device. Battery life seems as good or better than advertised. Battery is a 10 percent after at least 10 hours of us both playing around with it yesterday and today with lots of net use, video, downloading etc. A related downside is that it doesn't seem to charge on PCs when hooked up via USB, but apparently will when hooked up to Macs. But no biggie as I prefer wall chargers--one thing I hate about the iPod Nano I bought a couple weeks ago is having to charge via USB, or shellout for a wall charge--which it had came with one.

But in all a very slick device and I may pick one up down the road. But I'll still wait a while and see what comes out from competitors, what apps show up, maybe wait for the 2nd gen model etc. At least until fall as I need to save money for the summer, being an academic I have a couple unpaid months unless I land a grant soon, as well as some travel planned.

But for people on the fence leaning strongly toward buying one--go for it!