My brother got his on Saturday. According to him, the thing is ridiculously fast, the screen is really bright, some apps are amazing (he really loved one he found that acted like a nav system), and considers it the best 'media consumption device' he ever had.

Of course, it's my brother. What does he really know?

I stand corrected - Amazon conversion service indeed supports only HTML, DOC and PDF. I use Calibre. Still, the main interoperability problem is DRM, not formats by themselves.

Less than a book per device... I am not surprised. Of course, it's just the first day...

I first misread this to imply that your brother had gotten a Blendtec blender. The thing is ridiculously fast...

I liked Scott Kurtz's blog entry about the iPad. In the end, he was right:


That's pretty much the case for any of these gadgets, no matter who makes it, and I guess I'm out of the device hating business. I have a smartphone that I can actually get things done one (I mean as opposed to the one I used to have, not competitors), so I'm happy. Perhaps I was carrying resentment because my G1 was utter crap hardware-wise

And again, I do envy iPad owners for one thing: being able to use Square. I swear to God, that's enough to make me consider an iPad all by its self. If only I had some indication they were working on an Android version.

Hot damn! I could have sworn I'd looked over that page before! Didn't see that! WOOOT! I am unreasonably excited about this This will make things a ton easier for my with my work...

Now they just need to release it. Supposedly the iPhone version is due out at the end of the month.

That Square thing is interesting, but since the UK (and I think most of Europe) is Chip and PIN I wonder if it would be popular over here. We still have a magstripe on the chipped cards.

Hey! You used to couldn't do that! I know; I tried it again and again.

I wouldn't trust my CC details to a Square device. You've no idea what is running on the client device and whether it has been hacked or not.

What information are you going to get off the stripe that isn't also visible on the card itself? In the US, I'm pretty sure the answer is "none". Maybe not so in the UK.

Whilst pretty much the same information is kept on the front of the card as on the stripe, do you not try to keep control of how exposed your details are? You'd be okay with putting your card details into something which has been widely hacked and has had security issues like worms?

Whenever I pay for a meal at a restaurant, the server wanders into the back with my card for several minutes, which is more than enough time to copy down the card number, plus the Card Security Code, and maybe even make a copy of my signature. I generally don't know those people from Adam.

I'm not opposed to additional security, but it's kind of ridiculous to close the barn door when the fourth wall hasn't even been constructed yet.

Because that is considered more and more unpleasant by customers, though, I find interesting that here it Italy it is more and more common to see waiters walk to your table with a wireles card-reader and perform the payment operation there in front of you (I am referring specifically to CC payments, that is not requiring PIN)

Sure, one may argue that some waiters may have excellent visual memory, or that the wireless connection from the mobile device and its base is not secure (enough), and what not.

But security is not a yes-no concept. There are defferent degrees and I too would avoid decreasing it as much as possibe. I guess I would not entrust my CC details to similar systems either.

I'm aware of the European wireless card readers, but those are uncommon, at best, in the US. (In reality, they're virtually unheard-of.) The only place I've ever seen one was at the Apple Store.

Yeah, I'll second Bitt on this one. I recently heard about those remote readers, but I've not seen a single one in any restaurant in the Washington D.C. area.

Get a decent CC company if you're that worried about having the card info stolen. I've had my info stolen by using Amazon in the past. That didn't stop me from becoming a Prime customer later on.

*edit* Looks like I can expect Android support from Square pretty soon. I've signed up for the beta. Fingers crossed! */edit*


To bring this back to the iPad (I'm actually bringing the discussion ON topic? me? wow!): I have a question for the iPad owners. Could someone briefly discuss the Google Reader experience on this thing? This should be the best way to read...Reader, but I can't help but think I'd miss my oft-relied upon keyboard shortcuts. The entire time I'm on reader, my fingers are glued to the J, K, M, and S keys for the way I go through my feeds. It would take some adjusting to just using a finger to scroll.

First off, does it default to the mobile version? That would be annoying, because I can't stand the mobile version on a smartphone, let alone on a screen that size. It would look ridiculous.

In the UK at least, everybody has the wireless card machines or you go to the desk and do it. You generally don't lose sight of your card even before the change to chip & PIN.


I'm just puzzled as to why you'd automatically trust the device to be secure. The security on all the devices that Square supports has been thoroughly broken and absolutely anything could be running on it. It isn't restricted to people with the skill and knowledge needed to do so either. Anybody can do it if they follow some basic tools.

The real card machines are closed systems which have security measures to in theory prevent the leakage of your data and any tampering. I can be fairly certain that the card machine doesn't have any extra software added that may interfere with operation. I know that some of these machines have had proof of concept attacks on them but it is extremely unlikely that these will be widespread in the wild due to the requirement of physical modification.

Dignan argues that you should just get a decent CC company but I'd prefer to not have to deal with the stolen CC ordeal in the first place. It has happened to me once before years ago and it took me quite a bit of work to get it all completely sorted out.

Ok, time for some more impressions.

I'm hooked. I'll definitely be buying the 3G version when it comes out later. Web browsing on it is just really nice, but hard to quantify why. I definitely understand why Michael Arrington was trying to build a CrunchPad. While it does pretty much browse the web the same way any recent smartphone does, the larger screen means far less scrolling and zooming. And the speed is nice and quick. So far, lack of Flash has not been an issue, every embedded video I've come across has worked. I know I'll hit that limitation at some point, but not yet. As long as a site has gone HTML5 for video (like CBS and a few others), or they host their videos on Youtube/Vimeo, it just works. The only big hole here I see currently is Hulu, though currently I'm not watching much off Hulu these days.

Battery life is so good I don't think much about it. I charged it to full Sunday night, then used it heavily on Monday at work. Came home, and kept it on most of the evening, using the drawing program to take some notes while playing a game. Later that night I used it before going to sleep to watch some video, and used it more in the morning when I woke up to browse the web. Then tons more usage at work, including quite a bit of Plants vs Zombies while waiting on OS installs. This evening, the battery still had 25% charge left.

The speaker in this thing is also impressively loud, good enough for me to listen to podcasts in the car while driving down the highway. (something I've now started doing, as my amplifier stopped working Monday morning, need to troubleshoot that one). Screen readability is perfect at any angle, the IPS panel was a great choice for the device. However, my limited sunlight tests weren't so great. It was still readable, but the glare and reflections may get distracting. Sometime this weekend, I'll probably do a side by side test of the nook and iPad for reading outside and comment more.

Some of the native apps are really nice with the larger screen compared to the iPhone, though some don't quite make the best use of the space. BBC for example released a dedicated news app, but I still find it better to go to the web site instead. eBay and Craigslist have apps that make browsing their content way easier.

I haven't gotten into the productivity apps much yet, nor have I used the book reader, so impressions of those will come later.

Oh, and I'm keeping the Apple case. The flexibility of having it prop up the iPad two different ways is handy. Just need to mod the dock so I can use both at the same time.

*edit* As far as Google Reader is concerned, I'll have to try it later. I don't use it normally, so I may not be the best person to comment on how useful it is on the iPad. I know a coworker who does use Reader quite a bit though, and he owns an iPad, so I'll ask him for you Matt.

Considering all the networks seem to be jumping ship on Hulu, I don't think it matters much. Can you get video from the networks' sites? ABC has an app, right? So that one doesn't matter even.


I think one thing that everyone involved in this thread can agree on is that the JooJoo (awful name) will not be a threat to the iPad, and it certainly doesn't seem like it's going to be successful on any level.


Thanks, I'm very interested in that. To be honest, I hadn't thought about using a tablet like this for Reader until I lay down on the couch the other night to try reading it on my netbook. It's just not a good experience.

Again, being honest here, there's a lot I like about the iPad, and if enough uses for it come up for me, I just might have to swallow my pride and consider it. But really, I just can't do it at that price. It'll be interesting to see if Apple reduces the cost in 4-6 months...

I am a gadget freak, so I've stopped by a Best Buy to check the iPad out. I'm typing this on it right now. My first impression is that it's pretty, fast, and surprisingly heavy. I'm guessing that's the battery, right? I think I would find it hard to hold this thing upright on the couch for long.

As far as typing goes. At least the keyboard is 100% responsive. I find I can't really do touch typing, and it hurts my wrists to even try, and at best I can use three fingers on each hand.

Sadly, I've already experienced my personal biggest drawback to the iPad. I'd asked if it did Google Reader. Well, it simply doesn't. I can view it in mobile mode, which is essentially just a long list of stories, but when I choose desktop mode at the bottom of the page, it displays everything fine,and I can click on any links that are displayed, but. The second I try to scroll through a feed, it instead moves the entire window like it were all one image or something. So does mobile Safari not do Ajax or something?

Basically, that's the last nail in the coffin for me. I could live with the weight and the whole Apple thing (and the whole swallowing of my pride thing), but if I have to put down this thing (which is supposedly the "best web browsing experience ever"), and go to my computer so I can sit there for an hour reading all my feeds, then what's the point?

I believe I've also found another defense for the trackball on my Nexus One. I just tried to go back up in my post to change or add something, and I can't. Maybe I'm just not familiar enough with the iPhone OS to know how, but it certainly isn't clear to me.

Lastly, as I suspected this thing is just short of an ergonomic nightmare. I've been typing this I landscape mode, and having to tilt my neck or lower my eyes to look at text directly above the keyboard is starting to hurt. I'd say this is an average amount of writing, and I can't imagine typing more than a couple sentences on this. I haven't tried the dock, though, so that might help.

A few days ago, I was in full iPad bashing mode, but I'd started rethinking that stance and just letting things be. A few nights ago I tried using my net book in a relaxed position on the couch, and I started to think about the iPad much more favorably. The combined whammy of comics, Square, and Google Reader started making me surprisingly receptive to the idea. But now Square is going to be on Android sooner than I expected, and Reader simply does not work on this thing. Combine that with the weight, and I'm MUCH less excited now.

I'm sure there's a better RSS reader for iPhoneOS, and probably one that syncs with Google Reader.

Indeed there is, what you need is NetNewsWire. Syncs with Google Reader, downloads the feeds for reading offline, gives quick easy options for emailing articles, posting to Twitter, sending to Instapaper etc

http://netnewswireapp.com/2010/04/netnewswire-for-ipad-1-0/

Mobile Safari does do AJAX. It however doesn't do mouseovers, or other desktop UI metaphors. The proper interface in this case would be the "mobile" Google Reader, as it's built for touch input. My coworker here said he's been using the mobile site, and is quite pleased with it so far. Google has been adding iPad (or tablet form factor) changes to their apps, so maybe Google Reader just needs a quick update. GMail is apparently quite nice, but I'm not a GMail user either so I can't comment much there.

*edit* Looks like two finger scrolling works when using the desktop version of Google Reader. Seems a bit odd, but I'm so far out of web development these days I can't explain why this is necessary.


Again your trying to apply desktop computing concepts to a touch based device. Just touch where you want to put the cursor. This to me is the big difference between Android and iPhone OS. Android still has some desktop UI design in it, with things like dedicated zoom and scroll areas, cursors movable by other methods then touch, context menus activated by a special button, and so on. iPhone OS on the other hand throws it all out and starts over to try and build a pure touch based interface. Google wanted to make a smartphone, Apple wanted to make an entirely new computing interface and just happened to start with the smartphone.


I'm a big fan of the Apple case now, as it does provide a non flat typing angle with the full landscape keyboard, and that helps quite a bit. If I was going to type out a whole document though, I'd reach for a real keyboard, and conveniently bluetooth ones just work.

I'm not going to argue against your general point — you may be right — but I'm afraid I have some issues with your examples.


I don't know if you accidentally misused the term "context menu", or if I'm being overprecise in my definition, but the dedicated Android menu button is a contextless menu. (Or, I guess, a "current-page-context menu".) Actual context menus, that is, menus that are relevant only to a specific UI element, are accessed by a long press on the element itself.


I've not played with iPhoneOS that much, but precision placement of a cursor in text is a pain. I think I've seen that iPhoneOS provides a transient zoom-in for cursor movement, which is nice, but that's actually somewhat innovative, and I'll bet it's patented. Moreover, probably in a way that Google saw as tortiously defensible.

So I do understand your point here, but I don't really have a problem with an additional interface that (almost certainly) adds virtually nothing to the size of the device. The N1 trackball does do double-duty as a hard button.


I don't really know what you're talking about here at all.

Of course you guys are right about getting an app to use Google Reader. I have to do the same on my Android phones, so I don't know why I didn't think of that. I expect more from the web browsing experience on this form factor, though.

I'd have to see the app you mention in action, Andy. I have my preferred way of reading Reader, and so far I haven't seen any apps that accommodate me.


I'm not sure why this is necessary either. I didn't try that though. I'll give it a shot if I drop by the store again.


Then your coworker and I do not use Google Reader the same way. I view it in expanded mode, and either scroll through the stories or skip through them with J and K. I find this the best way to skim the stories. The mobile won't take any advantage of that larger screen. Hopefully Google will update it like they did GMail, which does look good on the iPad.


Sorry, but you're misunderstanding me. I was typing a long post in a text box. Eventually I typed more than the text box could display at one time. I had no idea how to go back up to the text that had gone off-screen, and I started to feel extremely frustrated as a result. On a computer you would just manipulate the text box's scroll bar. On Android, you still have 4-way directional motion available to you at all times, and I think it's intuitive to use the scroll ball to move around something like that. You might say that I just had to use two-finger scrolling. If so, then I'd say that's not intuitive, it's having a familiarity with the OS and guessing at the interface method they want you to use.


I don't think that would address my concerns. The displays at Best Buy were tilted, and that's how I was using it. It has nothing to do with the angle, anyway. It has to do with the proximity of the keyboard to the text you're typing. I'd wager that ergonomics experts are not fans of computing in this fashion


I wanted to add something else: I keep hearing about how iPhone apps look just fine on this thing in 2x mode. Are these people smoking something? I tried a half dozen apps on the device, and sadly almost no iPad-specific apps were loaded onto it, which I think is a major mistake on Best Buy/Apple's part. I tried basic apps like IMDb and games like some Need For Speed game. All of them were pixelated as all get-out. I had to stop looking at the IMDb app as it bothered me how bad it looked. Then if you put it in 1x mode, it looks ridiculously tiny on that big screen. And am I wrong, but even in 2x, it doesn't actually fill the screen, does it? It looked like there was about a half-inch or more border on all sides...

The iPhone's display is 320x480, so assuming it's really 2x/4x, that makes the display resolution of a "doubled" app be 640x960. The iPad's display is 1024x768. So that's an excess of 32 pixels on each short side and 64 pixels on each long side.

It's a 132ppi display, so 32px is just under ¼" and 64px is just under ½".

Two fingered scroll becomes necessary when a web page uses a iframe or other element to display scrollable content. With just single finger touch gestures Safari can't* know whether you are trying to scroll the page or the content of the scrollable element.

Hence the rather clumsy two finger scroll.

I'm curious to know how Android's browser handles this case ?

* ok, in some cases Safari probably could work out what you were meaning to scroll, but when you factor in the number of times it would guess wrong the two finger scroll is the less of two evils. In practice I rarely come across cases where I need to use the two finger scroll.

I may be misusing the term, but basically I'm talking about a menu option hidden off from the normal user interface. The dedicated button just never made much sense to me over having a button in the app UI when it was needed. Having the dedicated button encourages developers to use it and potentially hide something there that should just be part of the normal UI. I was mostly using it as an example of how a desktop mentality of context/right click menus still being carried over instead of being rethought for touch.


Fair enough, though it seems Google has gotten over fearing Apple patents by implementing their own multitouch now. I'd hope Google isn't hobbling other parts of the OS due to legal fears. Patents can be licensed after all.


Areas was the wrong word, buttons or other things. Google Maps is a perfect example. On the iPhone/iPad, it opens to just a full screen map. On Android, it's got UI zoom buttons, as if they carried over that feature from the web interface. I know it ties into the multitouch situation, but it's one of those situations where Google used an older UI method to get around it instead of coming up with a new touch method.


It's one of those things that does come down to opinion. Minimalist vs flexibility. The iPhone OS definitely went with the minimalist approach, starting from scratch and adding only what is absolutely necessary. Android and the phones built around it come from more of a traditional design model that tries to fit everyones different use cases, adding potential unneeded complexity. Over the years, I've come to appreciate the Apple method quite a bit, and understand their point of view on the iPad. Trying to shoehorn a desktop OS into a tablet failed for the most part, possibly due to bad UI and trying to adapt PC concepts. The iPad starts from near scratch, and builds up to try and make a touch device work well, while sacrificing flexibility of loading a desktop UI designed app on the device. This method forces new apps to be built around the new design, and introduces a new way of interacting with the apps. Is it the right approach? Hard to say, but it does present some interesting new use cases.

He explained his usage as going in, and being able to quickly glance over all the summaries. Then if one interested him, he tapped it. Otherwise, one full swipe on the screen resulted in him skimming past 40 or so entries at a time. He does use it on the desktop with J and K (Why is it J and K for previous/next instead of arrow keys?)


Ahh, ok, that makes more sense. And yes, it seems the answer is two finger scrolling there as well (I actually didn't know either initially). As for whats more intuitive, it all depends on what you already know. Scrollbars are just as alien to computer users coming from text environments as some of these new touch based gestures are to GUI users.


Probably not. Though I'm thinking the on screen stuff is there mostly for quick entry anyhow, and not really great for extended use. I still find the case handy, as it does put the iPad up at enough of an angle to see it. I've been putting it below my main monitor at home, and using it as a second machine to browse while waiting on something in Warcraft to happen. The other stand orientation works well for sitting it on the edge of my nightstand to watch a show.


Yeah, the iPhone apps running on the iPad are a joke for the most part. Some games work ok going up to 2x, but normal apps just look horrible. The iPads at the Apple store all had a ton of native apps loaded for demo purposes. Initially the iPad pulled in all my iPhone apps as well during the first sync. I've since gone back and deleted nearly all of them, only saving a few like Skype and Beejive, both likely to see universal builds soon.