Touching an iPad

At a party Friday night with my wife’s professorial colleagues I had my first hands-on in with the vaunted iPad. I was disappointed. The “big Touch” moniker seems more fitting than I expected. The screen is nice but not as good as I expected - closer to my netbook’s quality than the incredible depth and sharpness of my wife’s MacBook Pro display. The lack of anything like a full keyboard is also unfortunate. Typing, I found, was little easier than with my Tiny touch. I’m sure the Apple tablet would grow on me, but how much?

I believe this Gear Diary post has it right: iPad- Like A Rorschach Ink Blot You’ll See In It What You Want To See…

Comments

[Andy Mesa]

This is better than your original iPod touch review, so are we to assume you'd like this more than you like your iPod touch after a week of use?

[Frank@OBOW]

I was wrong before and I could be wrong again. At least this time I had the Touch to compare it to. The iPad belonged to an educational technology guy who does lots of work with and for Apple. He gets one of everything they make and does training for them on various devices; he's a Mac guy if anyone is. In his words: "it's just a big Touch."

[Luke]

I'd really like to see something in the 5-7" range. It makes the screen large enough to easily read e-mails and electronic books, or to watch movies, its still small enough to fit in a pocket, and its also small enough to hold and type on either in portrait or landscape mode. With a 10" screen, I really want a real keyboard to type on. I don't see me getting an iPad to replace my netbook, but I do see me getting a 5-7" screen device to do the same thing when my netbook gets replaced with a slightly larger thin and light laptop.