iPad first thoughts

You say you want a revolution? Well it is here and it is in the shape of a giant iPhone, but the comparison ends there. The iPad is a serious computing device, I don’t know where or how exactly this product will effect my life, but in the first three hours of using it I can see a few.

One of the reasons I carry my MacBook with me all the time (I do own a net book but never use it) is because of I shoot a lot of pictures and need to process the raw files, that is not going to change, but I will be leaving that bulky hunk of aluminum in the room. I recently downsized (for traveling) my camera gear from my Nikon D700 to a Panasonic Lumix GF1 because of weight, now with the combination iPad and GF1 my bag is manageable, which means less trips to the chiropractor!

Live blogging events, so you thought news was getting more realtime, just wait, this is going to be the device everyone will be using at conferences and events. There is no reason to bring a laptop.

Commuting, the only commute I do is NYC to Montauk, I could never use my laptop because there just wasn’t enough room, this post is being written on the Hampton Jitney, with easy and comfort.

Hmm didn’t try it in bright sunlight, will do that tomorrow, but taking a break in the park to catch up on some email, way better than sitting at my desk.

Ok my first impressions of functions and apps:

They keyboard is awesome! Well for me, i’m a lousy typist so, it works as fast as my regular keyboard, and it has the same (mostly) awesome (sometime funny) spell checker/fixer as the iPhone. Which is pretty cool, no worrying about having to click the ‘ it just works.

Web browsing, is fast and renders web pages as well as the desktop safari, most and I mean most sites need to adjust their code a bit to accommodate the fact that we are using fingers and not a mouse. The lack of flash is a drag but, yeah just but. It would be nice to have flash elements work. For folks that have flash only websites, you might want/should to rethink that!

Love the pinch zoom and scrolling, yeah it’s much the same as the iPhone but in this format it’s feels totally different and innovative, like I said earlier, it’s not just a big iPhone.

Apps, I haven’t downloaded any paid ones yet but some of the free ones are cool, the Weather channel is cool, they created more of a weather dashboard, it’s good they didn’t just port the iPhone app, but re-thought utilizing the power of the iPad.

iBooks, pretty sweet, I only looked at the Winnie the Pooh book that came free, yes it mimics print, and is pretty sweet, I sorta don’t mind the mimicking. Amazons Kindle app, nice job guys, anyone want to buy my gently used Kindle, I won’t be needing that anymore.

Etrade, while I only clicked around a bit on it, it is a mobile trading platform of pure sweetness, can’t wait to place my first trade via iPad.

Tweetdeck, is good, I was disappointed that the links don’t work, kind of an oversight I think.

I can go on, and will in another post, but my overall thoughts is the iPad is an under hyped fundamental change in the way people will be interacting with content, the web and the social web.

Oh, one last comment, The Wall Street Journal, dude, I don’t want to download the entire “paper” I think that is a fail. Hitting it from a proper wifi connection might be ok, but on my myfi, I didn’t have the patience to wait for the download, the NYTimes has a nice curated best of the paper app that works.
One last note, after 7hours of continuous use battery at 67%, not bad.

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