iPad Impressions

I like being able to go into rooms other than my office to read and it is great to be able to sit outside and read from the iPad.

Since I am the Apple person here at Andrew Seybold, Inc., I was asked to share my first impressions of the iPad that I began using about a week ago—the 32 GB, Wi-Fi-only model. A 3G version is coming (UMTS/HSDPA (850, 1900, 2100 MHz)). Although the iPad will be unlocked, AT&T is the only nationwide network in the United States that offers UMTS on 850 MHz and 1900 MHz, so it will be the only network offering 3G service, but you could use it on T-Mobile if you were satisfied with GSM/EDGE. Another gotcha is that the iPad uses a micro SIM card, which makes it nearly impossible to swap out with any of the SIMs that are available today.

The only way to set up, upgrade, and backup the iPad is to plug the unit into a PC or Mac and use iTunes. Thus, the iPad is not a replacement for a desktop or a laptop.  Apple is building a huge data center in North Carolina that most believe will house an Internet “cloud” and I believe that someday the iTunes function will be transferred to the cloud. If that happens, the iPad could become a standalone device.

I really like the iPad but I am not sure how many others have the same needs as I do. So far, it seems that Apple is selling more than it expected here at home and has thus delayed international shipments. I do a lot of reading on the computer—not only email but a wide number of technical and general news websites. I have two large monitors so my desktop setup makes it easy to read a variety of sources, but I get tired of sitting in front of the desktop while I am reading, so the iPad provides a better experience for me.

Holding a paper-sized screen enhances my reading experience. The display is crisp and for some reason looks better than my desktop displays. I like being able to go into rooms other than my office to read and it is great to be able to sit outside and read from the iPad. The display will automatically brighten up in direct sunlight, but high reflectively makes it difficult to read. However, the slightest bit of shade makes it very readable. 

The iPad has a dock on the bottom of the home screen. The five apps you choose for the dock are displayed on each screen and you can navigate to additional screens by swiping your finger left or right. You can have up to eleven screens with twenty apps on each screen. I have one screen devoted to reading. On that screen I have the iBooks, Kindle, Fluent News (a free app that consolidates news from many sources), NY Times, Wall Street Journal, and Reuters News Pro applications. In addition to the apps, I have bookmarks for the local newspaper, the local radio station’s web news site, Apple Insider, Tidbits, TUAW, CNN, Time, ESPN, and Facebook. With the iPad (and iPhone), you to can go to a webpage and create a home screen bookmark. The bookmark then appears on the iPad screen like an app. You simply tap on it and the browser opens up to the page you bookmarked. For many sites that are optimized for the iPad, such as CNN, Time, and ESPN, the experience is similar to the dedicated iPad apps designed for reading news.

The iPad Safari web browser does a fantastic job of rendering pages for the iPad’s screen. It is definitely the best browser I have seen on a mobile device. As you have probably heard, the iPad does not support Adobe’s Flash. I haven’t found that to be an issue so far but if the websites I wanted to read heavily used Flash, it might be a problem. It is interesting that many major sites have abandoned Flash because of the lack of support for the iPhone and iPad.

Apple’s email app is great. When holding the iPad in the landscape orientation, a summary of emails is on the left side and the selected email is displayed on the right like with Outlook’s viewer. The email app supports Microsoft Exchange, POP3, IMAP, and Web email for Apple’s Mobile Me, Gmail, Yahoo mail, and AOL. I set up all of these except AOL and found the experience better than on the desktop. Why? Well, for example, my Yahoo mail on my desktop has to be read in the browser. On the iPad (and iPhone), Yahoo mail shows up in the mail app as with Exchange or POP3 mail. The Contacts and Calendar apps seamlessly integrate with Exchange, Mobile Me, Gmail, and Yahoo (I have only used Exchange and Mobile Me). When the announced iPad operating system upgrade is available later this year, you will be able to read all mailboxes in one common inbox.

I have used Pages (word processor) and Keynote (presentation app) and found both to be limited. I couldn’t open our Wireless University PowerPoint presentation of 268 slides so I split the slide deck into two presentations of about 130+ slides, then both presentations opened. But as Keynote warned me, some slides were modified by changing fonts and the build order. They looked pretty good but the changes resulted in some slides that would have to be changed to correct some of these issues. With Keynote as a standalone application, I could create a slick show for a sales team to present a product or service, for example. The limitation for me is that it falls short as a cross-platform presentation tool. Hopefully, future versions will better handle PowerPoint transfers.

Pages, the word processing application, seems good for basic word processing and has many nice features. However, I don’t believe I will be writing a long, formatted report on the iPad. It has a nice built-in dictionary and the spell checking is done as you type. But there is no grammar checking feature. Pages is probably okay for creating short documents and editing documents on the road.

I have also found that the iPad is not the greatest device on which to enter a lot of data, but when using the Apple Bluetooth keyboard, it works well for out-of -office use. Entering a lot of text with the full-size Bluetooth keyboard is easy, but since there is no mouse next to the keyboard, I need to touch the screen for other functions and activities. Reaching up to touch is not as convenient for me as using a mouse, though for email and writing drafts it works fine. (This is not the first product that has required users to move from a keyboard to a touch screen for cursor control, which has been known for years to be a problem.)

I would give both Pages and Keynote a thumbs down. I am not sure the iPad is the right type of device for these applications, and the current versions are not ready for primetime. Future versions of these apps will need to be better at cross-platform transfers and sharing if the iPad is to go beyond being a nice display for small meetings. Perhaps Microsoft will decide to build a set of Office applications for the iPad, but this is only speculation at the moment.

Even though general office apps are not ready, I believe there are a lot of opportunities for the iPad in many vertical enterprise situations. The medical industry is reportedly salivating over the iPad. The ability to display and fill in forms quickly and easily will make it attractive in vertical markets where this type of data input has become the norm.

The 10+ hour battery life is great (10+ hours with the display on playing a movie and Wi-Fi updating email). In normal use, my battery has never dropped below 60% after an entire day. Unlike a laptop, the iPad is on all of the time and that always-on experience is great.

Speaking of movies, the iPad is great for watching movies, reading books, and listening to music. The other evening I had to drive my daughter to volleyball practice. While she practiced, I chose one of the ten full-length movies I had loaded on my iPad and watched it in my car. Watching on a 9.7-inch display was a surprisingly good experience. I have an iPod interface to my car audio system so I plugged it into the iPad and enjoyed full range stereo. Headphones or the iPad’s internal speaker would be okay, but not nearly as good as the multi-speaker system in my car.

The iPad works great for me. I really like it as a device to consume news and information as well as a book reader and movie screen. I like the freedom of being able to go anywhere around the house to read or to watch movies while away from home. It doesn’t replace a desktop or laptop, but it should work well for me on most business trips. In short, it is the slickest mobile device I have ever seen.

I hope you enjoy yours!

Barney L. Dewey

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Comments from Andrew M. Seybold: Buying an iPad, or at Least Trying To

After reading about the iPad in the press and Barney’s comments above, we decided we might want to buy a couple of iPads for our own use. I, of course, want the 3G-enabled version with the full 64 GB of storage, and we decided Linda would be fine with the Wi-Fi-only version. Over the week-end we set out to try them hands-on and see what was available. At Best Buy, we tried the demo iPads that were set up and decided we had to have them, but found that there weren’t any in stock so we headed for the Apple Store in downtown Santa Barbara. Upon arriving, were told they had a 64 GB Wi-Fi-only device in stock, but after checking further, we were told they sold the last one that morning but more should be arriving during the week.

We were offered the option of using an in-store Macintosh to go to the same website we can access from home to order the iPads but we opted to order them from home. Back at home, I signed on to the Apple Store and set about ordering the two units and a few accessories. Once I was done, I reviewed the order, hit the place order button, was given an order number, and was informed that the Wi-Fi-only iPad would ship within 4-5 days and the 3G model would ship toward the end of April. All was well, or so I thought!

The next morning, I received an email from Apple at 7:40 a.m. acknowledging my order and then at 8:02 a.m. I got another email saying that sales quantities were being limited because of heavy demand and our order had been cancelled because we had exceeded the number of units available to a customer. I checked this and found that I was limited to ordering two iPads sent to the same address, which is what I had ordered. So I called the toll-free Apple helpline and after talking to its very cool electronic voice (complete with the sound of keyboard tapping every time I was asked a question) I was relegated to waiting for an agent to help me—18 minutes. I told him the problem and gave him the order number, and after about 10 minutes on the phone with him he concluded that the Apple Store had seen a previous order from me two days prior—I had only accessed the order process to check out the options available and had not actually entered an order. He suggested that I change the ship-to address to my work address, which I did, and gave him the credit card info a second time.

While he was in the middle of doing this, he informed me that the dock I had ordered on the previous order—the one that had been cancelled—would ship anyway since it was in stock and had been processed prior to the order being cancelled. I had a hard time figuring that out but accepted it as a glitch in the system. He completed the transaction, gave me a new order number, and told me that this time the order should be processed. He was very efficient and easy to work with, and I was pleased we had finally resolved the problem, or so I thought!

The next day, I received yet another email from Apple, again telling me that I had ordered more than my allotted two iPads and that my order had, yet again, been cancelled. I picked up the phone and called Apple’s toll-free number again and this time, after a 15-minute wait, I was helped by a woman who, upon hearing my story, told me that this was a common occurrence and the call right before mine had been from a woman who had ordered one iPad and asked to have it shipped to her workplace, which was a bank. Because others had also asked to have their iPads shipped to the bank, her order bounced and was cancelled.

She explained to me that she would send my order over to the order desk and within 48 hours I would know if it had been placed or not. When I asked what she meant, she told me she could not override the order desk and that the policy was to send the order back to the order desk for review to determine if I was entitled to have my order processed! Needless to say, I was not happy with this answer, but she patiently explained to me that was the best she could do.

So as I sit here writing this, I don’t know if the order desk folks will decide to process my order or not. I am at their mercy even though the reason for the cancellation the first time was an unplaced order that is hanging around in the online ordering system, and even though the second order had been taken by an Apple rep who assured me that since I had changed the ship-to address to an address that is different from my bill-to address, the order would be processed.

Meanwhile, FedEx just delivered the iPad dock that was part of the first order that was cancelled. Will I be allowed to spend my money and buy the iPads or will I be turned down again as an unfit buyer? Stay tuned!

Andrew M. Seybold