My short experience with iPad :)

Hey guys. After a very long silence, now I’m back. I’ve been very busy for the past years to build my software business online. And thanks God, everything is now back to normal.

OK to kick start my post this time, I’ll share my personal experience using an iPad after my friend brought one back from the U.S. Like many people, I use computers all day long, for just about everything. Unlike the technical wizards, I’m don’t mind so much what goes on inside them as long as I can get the job done.

One thing you don’t see in a lot of the forum threads and reviews (both positive and negative) is that the iPad is using a processor made by Apple itself: the A4. This is a very big deal, and it accounts for something else that seems to have been drowned out in the reviews and debates: the iPad is very, very fast.

Yes: the hardware really does look like an overgrown iPod Touch. But start surfing the web, or opening up apps, and you’ll find the big deal is how fast it is compared to the iPhone and the iPod Touch. Compared to my iPhone, the speed at which web pages load is amazing. Every app I tried ran lightning fast.

I’m not sure where the criticism about the wide frame (officially called a “bezel”) around the screen comes from. If you don’t have it, your thumbs end up on the screen, where it can easily register as a touch. And since it’s an entirely touch screen machine, you don’t want that happening. Hence the frame / thumb rest.

Say what you will about Apple or about Steve Jobs, but Apple has done more to move the computer from the work desk into every aspect of daily life than any other tech company. One reason they have succeeded on such an enormous financial scale is that technical specifications (while impressive, I’m sure) are de-emphasized in favor of clear, obvious answers to the question “What do I want this device to do?” The fact that Apple has been fairly open about the new processor tells me that while the foremost emphasis on user experience has not changed, they have competently taken care of the stuff under the hood that makes it run.

If I get my own iPad, I will have to get a keyboard for it. The on-screen keyboard is fine for the kind of pecking you do when using typical apps, but if you do any amount of writing for your job, touch screen typing is not going to cut it. My own experience when it comes to the lack of a webcam and inability to run Flash has basically been, “Who cares?” Maybe that means I’ve been thoroughly indoctrinated into the Apple culture by having an iPhone and an iPod, but I have a feeling that once the apps start being cranked out in earnest, those two sticking points will rapidly become irrelevant.

And if they don’t, it’s likely that the second generation of iPad will address those concerns competently and put them to rest once and for all. While it’s pretty obvious from this review that I’m more in the “revolutionizes the human-machine relationship” camp, I also don’t think the iPad is a netbook killer. Rather it’s an all-purpose family machine that is going to see a lot of use in a very short time.