You might ask whether if the iPad is worth your money? In this review, I will be covering many aspects of the iPad: design, display, books, videos, apps, gaming, battery life... etc...
External Design
When I unboxed the iPad, the first thing I noticed was the design of the iPad. The build quality is excellent. When I touched the aluminium back of the tablet, honestly, it feels really good with my fingers better than those with the plastic-ky feeling as though it was cheaply made. Along with the iPad is the external connector which is the proprietary Apple connector. On the top left hand corner of the device is your standard 3.5 mm headset jack as well as a microphone for certain apps (e.g: voice memo). The speaker is on the bottom right-hand corner from where the Home button is. On the side is your volume rocker to control the volume and that's it.
Display
The display deserves its own section: with a resolution of 1024×768, it has a seemingly low pixel density compared to select high-end smartphones. That said, everything looks sharp and colorful. The contrast and colors are very nice. And the brightness distribution is stable regardless of the viewing angle. In direct sunlight, you will get a good amount of reflections, but overall, the iPad display does OK, especially if you are looking at an image with bright colors.
User Interface
For those who have used an iPhone or an iPod touch, there is no learning curve whatsoever. It’s the same look (with many additions) and feel and you’ll be productive right away. If you are not familiar with it, this is arguably one of the best touch interface out there, and I expect most people to be able to ramp up fairly quickly.
Media Consumption
iBooks: I like the user interface of the Apple book reader, it’s simple and readable, it has a search feature and most importantly, most books (if not all) come with a free sample. Overall, I don’t think that there is such a big difference between the Apple book reader and the Kindle reader when it comes to the act of reading but… Amazon seems to be a better book provider.
PDF files: the iPad has great support for .PDF files. It is much faster than the Kindle to handle those and the rendering is much better. If you are reading complex PDF files, this is a no-brainer.
YouTube: Youtube has more high-resolution content, so we tried watching a few movie trailers and they all came out looking smooth and sharp.
Music
The user interface is a little different from the iPhone version, but music playback basically works well, there’s not much to report on that front. it’s an iPod after all. LOL...
Productivity
Virtual keyboard: after typing on it for some time, here’s my feedback: it is so much better than a smartphone in either portrait or landscape mode. However, this is not as fast as a 10″ Netbook keyboard, or a full-sized keyboard.
Email: The email experience is comfortable. Because the Mail application user interface is tailored to a small display, it is better than it would be on a laptop. Emails are easy to read and it’s also easy to switch from one account to the next.
Calendar: the calendar is another element that benefits from an increased display size. Looking at a week’s worth of appointments can be done easily. In two taps, you can enter in Edit Mode and change the time and other properties of an event.
Gaming
There are ton of games on the Apple app store. In my opinion, I preferably like games which uses a controller or a mouse rather than tactile controls. The iPad is able to handle high graphics but with the iPad 2 which has a much faster processor, of course it obviously is much better than the iPad and provides a much better experience.
Web Browsing
The web browsing experience is very like the one on the iPhone/iPod touch, but a little faster, and with a much more comfortable display. Now, there is no need to zoom much and this feels very much like browsing on a computer but, they are some things which should be pointed out:
1) Not that fluent as you scroll up and down the page fast (seeing some checkered-board like patterns)
2) No flash. (can't say that much now, do I?)
Battery Life
Thanks to progress in low-power designs, testing the battery life of computers is becoming seriously long. The custom iPad A4 processor consumes very little power, so in most cases, the display will be the largest drain factor on the battery.
- Local storage video: 10+ hours
- Streaming video (YouTube): 10+ hours
- Book reading:11-12hrs
- Music (display off): (too long, if I want to publish this week)
A typical day: For my personal use, the iPad will stay alive for about 1.5 days, and possibly 2 days if I stop trying all the apps with shiny icons.
Sleep mode: most gadgets continue to drain power when they are in sleep mode. In the case of the iPad, I noticed that it lost about 1% per night (7hr), which is quite low. This might be a positive effect of not having too much stuff running in the background…
USB charging incompatibility: although it is mentioned that the iPad can be charged from a computer USB ports, it turns out that this is true mainly for Mac computer USB ports because they have a little more juice. It doesn’t work on most PC computers, or USB HUBs.
Battery replacement: the battery is not user replaceable, and like most batteries, it might lose its charge capabilities or simply die (after a while).
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