An rgbFilter review: X’s hands-on with the iPad

When I came into the office this morning, the very last thing I expected to see on my desk was a shiny, new, 16gb, Wi-Fi-only iPad.

Right about the time I was thinking to myself what I’d done recently to deserve such a gift, the owner came by to pick it up and apologize for cluttering up my work area. Fortunately, I’d had just enough to time to play with it that my reaction was less “Finder’s Keeper’s” and more “meh, whatevs.”

In short, after playing with the iPad for a solid 3 hours, my reaction can only be that, even if I was given one for free, I would STILL have trouble justifying owning one.

The short-SHORT version is, I love the iPad for what it is, but hate it even more because of what it isn’t.

It’s only fair at this point to do a device roundup. Currently in my house, we have:

• A 15″ Macbook Pro Unibody (5,1)
• A 15″ Macbook Pro rev4
• A Dell Mini 10V Netbook running Windows 7
• An iPhone 3G
• An iPod Touch
• A 5G iPod Video
• A Gen2 iPod Nano
• A Nintendo DS, with about an inch of dust on it.

Clearly, there is little, if any, mobile media niche that is not currently being filled. The only thing we do not own is any kind of E-reader. If the iPad were to fill any void wherein my media needs were not being met, it would be that and, to a much lesser extent, mobile gaming. Clearly, I am not in the market for this device.

But Steve jobs says I am. If the iPad is strictly a mobile device, then I have to compare it to my laptops, and since it’s strictly an ultra-portable, then I have to compare it to my netbook. But “netbooks don’t do anything well,” as Jobs famously said at the iPad launch. Surely though, my netbook, combined with my iPhone, can get me through my daily grind? (An HP Slate would be a more fair comparison, but a Netbook is all we got.)

With that in mind, let’s review this thing.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

First thing’s first: this device is simply beautiful. I mean ridiculously beautiful. I’m looking at it sitting on my desk right now and all I can think is “Hawt DAYUM that thing looks good.” And it feels even better. Holding it in your hand is like cradling some sort of sacred text, for several reasons; one, the contoured body and warm, brushed aluminum fits into your palm the way you hope Angelina Jolie’s rear end might, and two, it’s so goddamned rare and expensive right now that replacing it if you were to drop it means a quick jump over the border over the weekend.

Once you get past the initial infatuation, though, you quickly begin to see the device for what it is, and what it is is what you thought it was from day one: a great big iPod touch. There’s no two ways about it. Anyone who tries to call it anything more than that is kidding themselves. Full stop.

SPECS

Meh, you know what they are. (unless you don’t.)

But if you want to get into the guts of the thing, check out iFixit’s teardown and review. X-ray vision included.

USE

As has been said a billion times by now, using the iPad will be familiar territory for anyone who has ever owned an iPod Touch or an iPhone. The iPad is blazingly fast, responding to touches almost TOO well, and re-rendering web pages within milliseconds of being resized. There have been some early complaints of slow Wi-Fi performance, but none of that was present on the one I played with today; pages loaded quickly and reliably, sporting all features, except, of course, Flash. (In case you’re keeping score, that’s a point for my netbook.)

In practical use, the larger screen does offer some huge advantages. YouTube is a good example. This is what the YouTube app looks like on the iPhone:

And this is what it looks like on the iPad:

The larger screen, coupled with the modified OS, allows for a much richer experience when using the iPhoneOS’s YouTube app, one that I might even prefer over the standard web version. On the iPad, you can watch your chosen video in either vertical format, which shows the information below it, or in horizontal format, which renders the video in full screen. There’s also no image-destroying low-quality rendering at work here, at least as far as I can tell, so all video are displayed in the highest possible quality.

The OS has also been tweaked to make menu navigation easier. For instance, on the iPhone, if I want to go into settings/general, that’s 2 sub-menus away from the springboard, plus whatever folder I have to click down into. Here’s an example:

On the iPad, however, the settings page is a 2-column layout, making navigation infinitely easier:

The same principle has been applied to the Mail app, in which all your incoming mail is now shown on the top level and you can view it in the same 2-column layout as above, proving once again that Apple does in fact listen to its customers…eventually.

The size of the iPad does offer certain drawbacks, aside from it not fitting into your pocket. Primarily, holding the device single-handedly means using your whole hand to keep an iron grip on it, as its slippery texture and not-unsubstantial weight means Vegas odds says a good number of these will be making their way to the Genius bar having slipped out of sweaty palms. Additionally, the shape of the iPad means typing on it 2-handed is virtually impossible. In Vertical mode, the device is just barely wide enough to thumb-type with, but in landscape, it’s either single-finger hunt & peck, or you’ll be using your desktop clutter to create an easel for it to lean up against. And typing on your lap? Forget about it. The thing slips around on your jeans so easily that that picture you’ve seen of the guy typing on his iPad while propped up on his knee employs more magic than the iPad itself.

SO IT WORKS. GREAT. NOW WHAT?

Well that’s the thing. The iPad, while beautiful, is anything but practical. If you have a smartphone, you don’t need one, and if you have an iPhone, you already have one, PLUS a phone. If you have a netbook, you’re already carrying around an extra piece of hardware; it doesn’t seem likely you’d want to carry around another one. So where’s the need?

One of the great selling features of the iPad has been its connection to services people truly want; services like Netflix, (potentially )Hulu, and streaming video from the major networks like Fox, ABC, and NBC. But I see 2 problems with this; one, as a Canadian, these features mean nothing to me, as they are currently unavailable in the GWN. Of course, I can easily gain access to most of these features on a full-featured laptop, Dell Mini 10V included, which would seem to run counter to Jobs’ statement that “netbooks don’t do anything well.” Two, the afore-mentioned netbook can accomplish the same task, AND multi-task, meaning I could write this article while getting caught up on Modern Family. No, it doesn’t have the iPad’s sex appeal, but the big argument is not about aesthetics, it’s about practical use. And the iPad just plain loses in this department.

The other huge selling benefit of the iPad is its potential as an E-reader. Internally, we at rgbFilter have had some discussion as towhether or not that’s a viable statement. I have always believed it was, while Doug insists that the inherent flicker rate in LED/LCD screens would cause enough eye strain to make it useless over long periods. After much deliberation, I’m here to tell you…Doug is absolutely right. For casual, short-term use, the iPad serves the purpose of an E-reader adequately, but if you intend to actually *GET* some reading done, you’d be infinitely better served by a Kindle or a Sony E-Reader.

Someone mentioned to me that the iPad would make “the sexiest comic book reader EVAR.” With that, I completely agree. If you’re an avid comic book reader, and if there is in fact a CBR app for iPhone OS, and you have an extra $600 you need to unload, then my friend, the iPad is the device for you.

SO YOUR POINT IS…?

I’m torn on the iPad. I mean, there’s no questioning the fact that I flat out want one. But that’s a purely emotional reaction. I want one because it’s there. I want one like I want the last pretty girl in the bar at closing time; my perceptions are skewed, and I’m not bothering to take into consideration that, while pretty, she’s probably high-maintenance, generally useless, and kind of a pain in the ass.

But I definitely won’t be getting one. Putting aside the practical and functional uses, and limitations thereto, I keep coming back to the fact that the iPad is very poorly marketed. Apple is trying to tell the world that the iPad is a tablet computer, and it simply isn’t; I played with it for over an hour before I fully understood that “playing” was exactly what I was doing with it. The iPad is a toy at least, and a Personal Media Device at best. Even then it’s not a very good one; a true PMD is free to install whatever you want on it, while the iPad is stuck in Apple’s walled garden and can play back only what Apple says you can. This does not jive with me.

Tim Bray, Google Android Dev team leader, had this to say about Apple recently, before the iPad launched:

The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger. I hate it.

And that, sir, ain’t magic. That’s just the truth.

The iPad is available in the States right now and is coming to Canada at the end of April. The Dell Mini 10v, however, is available now.