iPad Second Impressions

Its not been 3 weeks since I've got my hands on the iPad. I was about to write this review ON the iPad but found that for some reason I could not get Safari on iPad to focus on this text entry field !!! (-1 for review !)

Since my first impressions I've lugged my iPad to a conference in Canada (www.balisage.net), used it daily for email and browsing, read 2 eBooks, watched 3 movies, created a dozen "paintings" and overall used it fairly exhaustively.

Conclusion. Its much better and useful then I originally thought, but I'm not throwing out my laptop.

Touch Typing.

After a week or so I got prety good at touch typing. If you have a desk or lap to put the ipad and can use both hands and use it in landscape mode I could nearly touch-type. By 'nearly' I had to hold my hands very still since there is no tactile feedback, but I could type without looking at the keyboard ... sometimes even error free. But not as easy as with a real keyboard. I quickly put it back into my backpack at the conference and whipped out my laptop.

But its good enough to write 2-5 paragraph emails and I found while sitting in my living room recliner I would use the iPad to write emails instead of going to the 'extra trouble' of leaning over to grab my laptop and booting it up.

Reading

Reading Emails is a joy. Even more so then my laptop primarily due to the fine control over zoom. Its easy to zoom into an email so its just big enough font to read cleanly reguardless of if I have my glasses or not or the room lighting.

EBook reading is quite good. I've been using it instead of my Kindle but with Amazon books, for the last week. The nicest thing is the backlight so I dont disturb my wife quite so much by having a LED light on my chest while reading in bed. However I do find it does cause eyestrain sooner then my Kindle and I like the physical page buttons on the Kindle better then the iPad. But it makes up for it with a backlight and larger screen. Almost on par.

If I already had an iPad I would think twice about buyiung a kindle. But if All I wanted is a book reader, I'd suggest a Kindle.

Touch operations.

Still in love with the magic feelings of the touch. Last week I put on a full screen protector sheet and am considering removing it. It seems to blur the screen slightly (or maybe its my eyes) and seems to make the touch screen slightly unresponsive. But its hard to tell for sure without 2 iPads neck to neck to see if this is my imagination or its real. But it just seems slightly more blury and slightly harder to activate touch. I am thinking of pealing off the protector and going naked (as apple suggests ... they no longer suggest screen protectors !)

Movie Watching

Wow. Thats all. 3 letters. Wow. I watched 3 HD movies in bed in my hotel which I had previously downloaded (DO pre-download ! The hotel Wifi was horrible).

I had to plug in my earphones to get loud enough sound. Other then that it was amazing.

Real HD resolution video and clear sound. A fantastic experience for watching a movie alone.

Overall ... I'm still impressed

Very impressed. Cant wait for V(N+1). A phone ? Camera ? Video Camera ? Better file exchange ?