Loving my new iPad

I cancelled my pre-order for an Apple iPad when I found out that it would ship sometime in June. I waited a month for it to come to Canada. I’m not ready to wait another month while shipments trickled in.

I checked Twitter for “iPad availability in Toronto” and was surprised to see that Carbon Computing still had some in stock. Today I phoned them and picked up the second-last iPad (16 GB Wi-Fi version) in their store.

3G? No thank you. I already have an iPhone 3G for when I’m out and about which isn’t very often. I work at home and wouldn’t really use the 3G option. The Wi-Fi version of the iPad should be perfect for my needs.

Why buy an iPad in the first place? The simple answer is that I’m an Apple fanboy. I drank the Steve Jobs cool-aid. I also design websites for a living and want to be able to design sites so they render properly on an iPad. Apple sold 2 million of these things in the last 60 days. The tablet market isn’t going away any time soon. It’s still too early to tell if the iPad is a game changer but if it is, I want to be prepared and that means using an iPad.

A lot of people say, “I don’t get iPad.”. The commercials and the print ads don’t tell the full story. You really have use an iPad and experience it to see what all of the fuss is about. The web browsing on this thing is great. I don’t know how but web pages load much faster on my iPad than they do on my desktop computer. Everything feels fast, the user interface looks amazing and it is a lot of fun to use.

I’m typing this blog post on the iPad and I’m surprised at how quickly I’ve adapted to the on-screen keyboard. In landscape mode the keyboard is almost full-size and quite usable.

If you’re a photographer then I think you will love this device. Photos look great on the iPad and it’s a great way to show your portfolio. Optimizing my photos for this device is now on my to do list.

You can use most of your iPhone apps on the iPad but they don’t fill the screen. There is an option to display apps at twice their size but they don’t look very good. Try using the iPad version of Twitterific to manage your Twitter account and you’ll be impressed. Twitterific is free and much nicer than the new Twitter app for iPhone.

Using the iPad is similar to the experience I had when I purchased my first Macintosh in the late 1980s. I can’t put it down and turn it off.

Posted in iPad at 6:58 PM