Apple iPad review

After months of build-up, we finally have an Apple iPad in our hands. But is this really going to create a new category of portable between a smartphone and a laptop, or is it a beautiful piece of hardware that will soon be doubling up as a fancy tea tray?

The hardware

Ease the iPad from the usual stylish Apple box and it hits you: the iPad really does look like an expanded iPhone, right down to the single Home button beneath the 9.7in display. The back is made from curved aluminium, complete with a large Apple logo, and around the sides sit the power button, volume controls, a 3.5mm headphone jack and the same 30-pin dock connector used by the iPhone.

There were criticisms before launch that the wide black bezel around the display was excessive, but in practice you need that much space to hold the iPad without inadvertently touching the screen. The glass display is treated with a fingerprint-resistant coating, but even so after a few minutes’ use you’ll find it covered in smudges. Apple doesn’t provide a cleaning cloth in the box; a quick wipe on a sleeve is inelegant but effective.

The screen is every bit as good as you’d expect. It has a 1,024 x 768 resolution and uses in-plane switching (IPS) technology to ensure vibrant colours and a wide, 178-degree viewing angle. In use, it’s bright and full of contrast. It is very reflective, though, so don’t expect it to be legible in full sunlight.

The iPad is powered by a 1GHz Apple A4 processor based on ARM technology, and comes with 256MB of RAM, between 16 and 64GB of solid-state storage, 802.11n wireless and Bluetooth 2.1. We tested the mid-range 32GB model with Wi-Fi only; 3G versions will be arriving later.

Apple claims “up to ten hours” of battery life, and we wouldn’t argue with that. We actually managed a full ten hours on a single charge, with a mix of video and music playback and heavy switching between apps.

The user experience

There’s no polite way of putting it: the iPad is a bit of a porker. Not in a chubby sense – it’s incredibly thin, yet still feels durable – but it weighs 680g, which is more than twice as much as a Kindle. As you’d imagine, holding it in one hand isn’t comfortable for more than a minute or two. There’s a good reason Steve Jobs demonstrated it resting on his knee in an armchair: it disguised the fact that you need extra support for prolonged use.

Comfort aside, if you’ve used an iPhone the experience will be instantly familiar. Put simply, nothing else comes close. The learning curve is non-existent and it’s all helped by the iPad’s sheer speed.

Web pages render as fast as they do on a desktop PC and pinch-zooming is instantaneous, which helps ensure the screen size isn’t the limitation we expected it to be. For those unsure what they’d use an iPad for, browsing the web from a sofa is one of the most persuasive arguments. It feels every bit as intuitive as on the iPhone, but the size and screen quality free you from constant scrolling and zooming.

There’s one monumental caveat, though, and that’s Apple’s continuing disdain for Flash. You soon realise just how many websites rely on it, and while its absence is not quite a killer blow, it puts a good few sticks of dynamite under Apple’s claims that the iPad is “the best way to experience the web”.

Everything works in both landscape and portrait mode, the display immediately rotating to accommodate the orientation – there’s no up or down, no right or wrong way to hold it. For using it lying in bed there’s also a handy rotation-lock switch; during the announcement in January, this switch was designated as a mute button, but this is a far more useful function. Muting is now done by holding the down volume rocker, which is slightly annoying if you just want to reduce the volume by more than one or two notches.

A major criticism is that third-party apps can’t multitask (although some Apple apps do – mail is checked in the background, for example, and the iPod app can play while you’re doing something else). How much of an issue this is will depend on your way of using it. Opening and closing apps is fast, and many retain their state when closed. It’s those that don’t that will cause frustration; the New York Times Editors’ Choice app, for example, sends you to the home page upon opening, so nipping in and out proves frustrating.

(UPDATE: OS 4 will offer multitasking upon its release this summer.)

Of course, there are some apps that almost demand multitasking to function properly – think Twitter clients and third-party music players such as Spotify. While there’s a possibility we’ll see some form of it in an impending OS update, right now it’s a limitation that hampers the large, flexible iPad far more than it ever has the little iPhone. If we’re seriously to view the iPad as superior to a netbook, we should at least be able to flick between a website and a messaging app. It’s basic stuff.

The virtual onscreen keyboard is another limitation. The device is too wide to type with your thumbs, and typing with one hand while holding it in the other is a slow pecking process. Place it on a desk in landscape mode, though, and things improve. We became proficient pretty quickly, to the point where hammering out an email is far from an unwieldy chore. If you really want to write your novel on it, the iPad’s integrated Bluetooth will pair with any compatible keyboard, and Apple offers a neat iPad dock with a traditional iMac keyboard.

Bundled apps

Apple knows the success of the iPad will be driven largely by the software, and it shows. Photos is perfectly tuned to the iPad’s natural ability to display your shots, with slick slideshows turning this into an instant photo frame.

The Calendar and Contacts apps won’t bowl you over with their numerous features, being functional rather than flexible. They’re beautifully designed, though, and look very much like their paper-based equivalents.

Apple also includes an enhanced implementation of the iPhone’s Maps app, and it works fantastically: zooming and scrolling are smooth and fast. Overall speed feels limited by the network connection rather than the speed of the app itself.

A serious downside of the Wi-Fi-only iPad is its lack of satnav capability. Maps is reduced to approximating your location using information it has about local Wi-Fi networks, which is far from accurate. Only the 3G versions of the iPad will include GPS.

Then we come to the iPod app. This not only borrows much of its interface from iTunes, it’s tightly integrated to it. That might sound a good thing, but it means the iPad will only play music you’ve copied on to the device – you can’t stream tracks from your iMac, for instance.

The iBooks eBook-reader app has been lauded as a “Kindle killer” application, and on first impressions it should certainly give Amazon pause for thought. The extreme attention to detail even extends to a faint outline of the text on the previous page showing through as a page turns, just as it would with a regular book.

We did have to strain a little to read the text in bright sunlight: that reflective TFT again. And there are the inevitable problems reading from a backlit display for any length of time, which you simply don’t get with a dedicated reader based on E Ink technology (or a book for that matter).

Third-party apps

At launch there are thousands of third-party apps available: the iPad is compatible with almost all the 150,000+ iPhone apps on the App Store. But once you’ve used full iPad apps, running an iPhone app feels very limiting; they run either in a window in the middle of the screen at standard size, or scaled up to double size with the attendant pixel blurring.

We tested a number of third-party apps designed for the iPad, and results were mixed. One of the stars is the $9.99 Scrabble app, which is as close to playing on a real Scrabble board as you could hope for. There’s even a free companion iPhone app allowing you to use the iPhone as your tile rack; you flick the tiles from the iPhone to the board on the iPad.

The BBC News app, which sadly won’t be available in the UK until the BBC Trust gives the all-clear, is similarly impressive. In landscape mode you flick through the thumbnails that sit on the left-hand side of the screen; press one you’re interested in and the story appears on the right-hand side. Then flip to portrait mode and the story fills the whole width of the page.

Given the limited time developers have had, it’s no surprise that some of the other apps we tried were still rather buggy. They’ll need updating now that developers can test on the actual device rather than the emulator.

Conclusion

The iPad is the first in a series of products that could transform the industry; we know HP is releasing its slate later this year, Dell is producing a 5in slate based on Google Android, and rumours abound that both Nokia and Samsung are producing iPad rivals, too.

We can see why. Although the iPad isn’t a replacement for your main computer, there is an argument for it as a secondary device. Many people will be able to manage quite happily with just a desktop machine and an iPad, or one of the many slates due to appear in the coming months.

That said, don’t be fooled into thinking the iPad or its future competition can match a laptop running a full-blown operating system. And the iPad in particular is restrained by Apple’s controlling influence, as is shown by the crippling lack of support for Flash.

Then again, what the Apple iPad has that no laptop can match is fun. It’s difficult to express just how easy it is to use this device. We can see gadget lovers joining the Apple faithful in the queues outside the Apple Stores when it’s released in the UK later this month.

Physical specifications
Dimensions	190 x 13 x 243mm (WDH)
Weight	680g
Processor and memory
Processor	Other
RAM capacity	0.26GB
Screen and video
Screen size	9.7in
Resolution screen horizontal	1,024
Resolution screen vertical	768
Resolution	1024 x 768
Drives
Capacity	32GB
Replacement battery price inc VAT	£0
Networking
802.11a support	yes
802.11b support	yes
802.11g support	yes
802.11 draft-n support	yes
Integrated 3G adapter	no
Bluetooth support	yes
Other Features
3.5mm audio jacks	1
Hardware volume control?	yes
Integrated microphone?	yes
Integrated webcam?	no