Apple iPad 32 GB WiFi

Apple iPad 32 GB WiFi
Apple Store	499.00

After being the hottest topic in the world of technology for at least the last two months, the iPad was finally released in the UK last Friday, 28 May. But what exactly is Apple selling to the masses of curious customers and hard-core Apple addicts who queued for hours, sold their mother, pitched their tent, or skived off work just to get their hands on an iPad? Is it a giant iPod Touch or an oversized iPhone? Is it just a watered-down computer? Is it for viewing content and surfing the web? Is it a product that's set to save the written press? Is it a new kind of netbook? After having the iPad for almost a month now, we reckon we're ready to take a step back from the hype and formulate some kind of opinion on this new connected device.

As yet though, our impressions of the iPad aren't set in stone as Apple's tablet has no real competition to compare it with. Even though the 'tablet' concept existed long before the iPad, Apple has simply revolutionised the sector. What about the Archos 9 and the Fusion Garage JooJoo, I hear you cry? Don't worry, we'll be reviewing them as soon as we get our hands on them.

The iPad tested here is a 32 GB Wi-Fi model. We'll be testing a 3G model soon too, as we've literally just managed to get one. However, given that you'll probably be able to count on one hand the amount of times you actually whip out your iPad and connect to 3G in the street, we still reckon the Wi-Fi version will be sufficient for most users, especially if you have a Wi-Fi hotspot subscription or a 3G-to-Wi-Fi signal converter (BeWan, D-Link, Novatel). Anyway, it's time for the moment you've all been waiting for ... is the iPad actually any good?


Design & Handling

I don't think we really need to tell you much about the tablet's design, as it has that typically distinctive 'Apple look' that's helped seal the brand's success. Plus, it's been flashed all over the press for months now. For several years, Apple has been championing the concept of 'less is more', first pioneered by the German architect Mies van der Rohe. Needless to say the iPad is stylish, minimalist and the finish is simply impeccable.


Even when Steve Jobs first presented the iPad, you could tell he was struggling to handle the product in a natural manner, and believe me, you'll soon start to feel every one of its 680 grams. After using the iPad for a few weeks, we reckon that although the product's weight is occasionally tiresome, it's not excessive enough to make handling the iPad a problem. Plus, Apple has cleverly spread out the components to balance out the product's weight, so you won't find one end heavier than the other. However, when handling the iPad you'll probably find yourself doing a kind of jugging act, passing it from one hand to the other as your hands get tired.
We found it most comfortable to use sitting down, which further confirms our hunch that the iPad is designed for use indoors, not out and about in the street. For the ultimate iPad experience though, you'll probably have to invest in some kind of stand (not supplied as standard).

When trying to watch a film on the train, the iPad was just too painful to hold after around 15 minutes. Even with the train's mini table flipped down to stand it on, your wrists will still get tired of supporting the iPad after a while. It's definitely worth investing in Apple's iCase (£30) for situations like this.

Your fingers rest naturally on the black bands around the edges of the screen, which prevents you from pressing things accidentally. However, in practice, your thumbs do tend to overshoot the black borders a bit. Plus, if you're using the iPad without headphones, the speakers (not the tablet's strongest point) do make the aluminium casing vibrate slightly. The iPad's size and weight make it perfectly portable, and you can easily slip it into a bag without having to worry about doing your back in. It's probably a bit like carrying around a large book in terms of weight, although it's easily as slim as some magazines.

The Screen

The iPad stands out from other mobile devices with its 9.7-inch (24 cm) IPS screen. The colours are bright and highly contrasted and the blacks look deep in video playback. It's certainly impressive, but the shiny, reflection-prone screen does make the iPad feel a bit like a giant iPhone at times. It's therefore best used in the shade, as in bright sunlight the screen can be quite difficult to read.

Another thing the iPad has in common with the iPhone is effective multi-touch controls. The screen is just as sensitive and accurate as Apple's smartphone screen but in a much bigger format.

The screen's only real downfall is its ability to pick up fingerprints, a problem common to many touch-screen devices. So yes, the iPad is a fingerprint magnet, but given that it's primarily designed for use with your fingers, it's hard to see how that could be prevented.


Interface and Navigation

Anyone who's familiar with the iPhone will find their way around the iPad easily. One minor revolution, however, is the ability to change the wallpaper, as you can now (finally) choose different backdrops for the home screen and the standby screen. The interface is still based on an application bar at the bottom of the screen with icons for direct access to all the main applications (E-mail, Safari, Photos, iPod). There's even room to add two of your own favourite apps to the main toolbar.

Moving from page to page is one of the most surprising features of the iPad. The A4 processor is so effective it feels like handling an iPhone on speed. The iPad is fast, smooth and seamless, and selecting, launching and closing applications, for example, is much quicker than with the iPhone.

The screen is quick to flip between portrait and landscape mode when you turn the iPad round. There's also a screen-rotation lock button on the side of the device, which allows you to lock the screen in portrait or landscape mode. Most of the iPad's integrated functions are well designed and laid out, like the e-mail applications or even the settings page, which manages to display a whole load of options without looking busy or untidy.

What's more, the number of applications in the tablet (ours has 98 and over 17 GB of video) apparently has no effect on the iPad's speed, responsiveness or start-up time. For surfing the web, Wi-Fi connectivity is powerful and load-up times are generally fast, even with just one bar of connection strength. Some iPad's have reportedly had trouble keeping hold of a Wi-Fi signal, but that certainly wasn't the case with ours, and even after a month's use we've still got nothing to complain about.

Keyboard & Text Entry

The quality of the virtual keyboard is an important factor, as it will effectively determine whether the iPad can be used on a professional level. It'll also influence the product's ability to perform all the communication-based tasks that have been among its main selling points (e-mail and social networking in particular), even though you can always hook up a physical keyboard if required (not supplied as standard, obviously). We did sometimes use Apple's Bluetooth keyboard, but when you're out and about or even just lounging on your sofa, an external keyboard is cumbersome and impractical.

Text entry is effective. There are very few errors, and like on the iPhone, the predictive text function seems to be jam-packed with entries. You can even type away as frantically as you like, as the on-screen keyboard is incredibly accurate and fast to react. It might, however, take you a little while to get used to, as feeling the responsiveness of a physical keyboard in a touch-screen product is certainly a new experience.

However, we were hoping to find something more than just a basic keyboard, as it's essentially just a bigger version of the iPhone keyboard. We were hoping the keyboard would make better use of the large screen size by integrating a numeric keypad, for example. This is particularly surprising when the iPad is in landscape mode, as there's loads of extra space that could be used to improve the keyboard. Maybe version 4.0 of Apple's mobile OS will bring a few welcome changes in this field.

Use

Thanks to the iPad's application-based functionality, you can decide exactly how you want to it. The iPad is like a blank page waiting for you to fill it with the content of your choice, mainly in the form of apps. You can use it as a portable music and video player for content you've downloaded from iTunes, a lightweight portable tool for work, a mobile Internet terminal or all three at once! The range of possibilities is huge and is set to keep on growing and evolving with the increasing number and diversity of applications available.

We picked what we considered to be the five most common types of use for the iPad and evaluated the tablet's performance in each field. Our opinions are based on our experience of using the iPad over the last month, the product's potential and its current lack of competition.

Multimedia

For playing music, SD and HD videos, as well as photo slideshows, the iPad is a great multimedia device ... so long as that media comes from iTunes or iPhoto. For digital photos, you'll have to buy a separate camera connection kit (£25) for transferring pictures onto the tablet as it has no USB port or memory card slot. The connector allows file transfer from an SD card. You'll already find all the main photo editing applications available in the App Store and there'll undoubtedly be more to come too, as was the case with the iPhone.



It's a shame Apple hasn't included Cover Flow to sort and display album covers like in iTunes. Sound quality from the speakers isn't great and you'll be better off using headphones.
Screen glare is a problem in video playback, but with the screen correctly positioned and the optimal lighting conditions, the result is really quite impressive. There is, however, a noticeable difference between SD and HD videos, as the screen is very unforgiving with any lack in definition.

E-Books

One of the questions everyone seems to be asking is whether the iPad could effectively stamp out the stand-alone e-book reader. It's also been billed as a product that'll shake up the way we read newspapers and magazines for ever!
It's too early yet to say whether the iPad will save the written press from a fate worse than the Internet, but given the look and quality of the first few apps available (see below), there's certainly scope for print media to adopt new multimedia-based formats that would give the industry the boost it needs. Watch this space.

You'll quickly get tired of reading e-books on the iPad, however, due to the screen's constant backlighting. E-ink is certainly easier and more pleasant to read, even if it is less flashy and impressive as the iPad's full-colour screen. When reading in bed with little or no lighting, you may find the iPad screen more than a little blinding. We only held out for an hour at a time, even with the screen brightness turned down to its lowest setting.

For comic books, however, the iPad is fantastic. The bright colours and the new ways of interacting with content help bring all the action to life in a whole new reading experience. The Marvel and ComiX applications, for example, offer several free comic books to give you an idea of what's on offer.

The success of the iPad as an e-book reader will inevitably depend on the amount of content that'll be available, notably in the iBook Store. This in turn depends on whether publishers are willing to make their content available digitally. Price will be a factor too, as users are less likely to buy e-books or ibooks that aren't much cheaper than regular paper publications. The overall reading experience with the iPad is pretty impressive though, as you really feel like you're holding a book and you can turn the pages with your finger just like you would a paper page. You can also change the font and text size.

Games

Gaming on the iPad is still a bit of a sketchy area. The iPad is heavy and complicated to hold and handle for anything other than 'passive' games like puzzles, Sudoku, crosswords etc. With games like N.O.V.A by Gameloft (FPS) or Real Racing HD by Firemint, the visual quality makes the games jump off the screen and slap you round the face, but they also quickly become tiring to play. We're keen to see some more in-depth strategy games come to the iPad, as these would really get the best out of the screen without you having to handle the iPad in a unnatural, uncomfortable manner.

Internet

For displaying web pages, the iPad has come a long way since the iPhone. Although you can still zoom in by tapping on the part you want to enlarge, it's finally nice to be able to view your favourite websites as whole pages too. Navigation is typical Safari stuff, with the same bookmark system for marking your favourite pages.

There still, however, remains the much-publicised problem of the iPad's lack of Flash compatibility. Although you can kind of live without Flash on the iPhone, it's more problematic when surfing the web on a screen this size, and it's a shame that Steve Jobs and Adobe's mutual warfare has to spoil the user experience. Although most major websites have, or will have, their own application allowing them to bypass or replace Flash, general web browsing is still not quite the same without it. This is a particularly irritating feature of the tablet that's got many technology geeks and iPad reviewers riled to the point that they'll be boycotting the product. But are they really the iPad's target customers? Nothing could be less certain, but then that's a different story ...

Work

You can do work on an iPad.  In between taking notes at meetings, sketching out ideas for articles and reading documents with plenty of graphics and formatting, we've used it to access a lot of content.  The iWork suite is a must, especially for Pages and Numbers, the equivalents of Microsoft's Word of Excel, which allow you to open your documents and edit them.  Specially designed for the iPad's touch-screen interface, these business apps can be difficult to use at first because they're laid out differently to their Office counterparts. They can, however, export documents in Office-compatible formats.  For plenty of professionals, we reckon a connected tablet like this could be a very useful mobile tool, particularly for those who mainly use their laptops for checking e-mail, web browsing and staying up to date.

But can the iPad replace a netbook?  That all depends on what you want to with it.  We don't think the iPad is designed as a serious challenger to the netbook and both products can live happily side by side.  With a similar size screen, the lighter iPad also has the advantage of a touch-based interface that's easy to use for both children and older people (we've tried it on both!) and its apps.  Netbooks, on the other hand, are more flexible for business computing.  It's actually smartbooks that the iPad could cause problems for, especially the 3G version.  Both offer a touch-screen interface, a mobile web connection and are portable enough to be easy to carry.

Apps

The iPad uses the same app environment as the iPhone. The AppStore, one of the keys to the iPhone's success, plays exactly the same role here. These days, connected mobile devices only really begin to take on a life of their own when you start filling them up with your own pick of apps, and you can hardly criticise Apple's offering on that front, with over 200,000 titles currently available. All of the existing apps work on the iPad, but only those marked 'HD' take up the whole screen. Other iPhone apps work at the phone's native resolution, and are displayed right in the centre of the iPad screen with a large black border around the edges. You can zoom in, but it blurs the image somewhat. HD versions are already available for the majority of well-known apps, but they're more expensive. There are a few glaring omissions though, including Facebook.

Although decent newspaper apps were thin on the ground before the revolutionary touch-screen tablet came along, traditional titles have learnt form their experiences with the iPhone.  There are already some very good apps out there from titles such as the Wall Street Journal and the Guardian.  The current hit, though, is Wired magazine.  The paper version is already streets ahead of its rivals, but the recently released app offers a great vision of what paid-for magazines could look like in the future.

Photo editing apps are another much sought-after category.  While the iPhone's camera isn't that great, the SD card adapter (available separately) paves the way for mobile JPEG photo editing.  Developments in the field will probably be based on user requests, as was the case with the iPhone.

Battery Life

With the battery life listed as 10 hours, we were wondering whether that would end up being a ridiculously optimistic estimation, as is so often the case with manufacturers' figures.  Apart from one marathon session where it slumped over the line after 11 hours, the iPad generally lasts between 8 and 9 hours.  Playing video eats up the battery more quickly, but still, it's not like it goes shooting down either.  For example, we downloaded the last episode of Lost over Wi-Fi, a HD file containing 108 minutes of footage and weighing in at 3.4 GB.  When we played the video with the brightness set to two-thirds of its maximum and no headphones, it used 27% of the battery life.  Plus, playing the NOVA game for an hour only shaved off 5%.  Try the same thing on an iPhone, you can safely multiply that by six.

When using e-mail, surfing the web and using ordinary content-based apps, we found we had to recharge the iPad every two to three days.  Charging does take a while, and it isn' t fast to fill up with power.  Fortunately, Apple has improved the 6 W iPhone power adaptor to supply a 10 W one here.  One big drawback is that you can't charge the iPad via your computer's USB port.

Is it just a gimmick?

Apple's tablet won't have any trouble carving itself out a niche alongside similar products like laptops, smartphones and netbooks.  But is it really a mobile device or is it better used at home?  Opinion is split: we wouldn't dare get it out on the Tube, for example, but on a train journey or a flight, at a restaurant or in a bar with a Wi-Fi connection, then yeah, why not?  Testing out the iPad at home, however, highlighted a problem we'd never even considered ...

We had originally thought that the iPad would be perfect for sharing with the whole family. We had visions of ourselves passing it round the living room, letting the kids play with it a while and then getting on with our work.  But we soon realised that the iPad is lacking one very useful feature found in real computers: user accounts.  This means each user will have to log in and out of each service each time they want to check their e-mail or use Facebook, for instance. It also means you'll have to remember to log out when you've done.  It may seem silly to complain about such a trivial feature, but it soon gets irritating.  Otherwise, sharing is fine, and you can even have a homescreen for each user with a custom pick of apps.  Ultimately though, the iPad, like a mobile phone, is more of a personal device than one that's truly designed to share.

Apple iPad 32 GB WiFi
Apple Store	499.00

The Verdict

After using the iPad for a month, we're still not sure what to make of it.  Beyond the wow factor that immediately ensues when you encounter one for the first time, we still have a few doubts about the iPad.  It's a whole new type of product, which brings in new ways of interacting and getting online, and as there's little to no competition, giving the iPad a score is very difficult indeed.  That's made harder by the fact that there's not just the device itself to consider, but the whole ecosystem that's slowly building up around it.

The iPad itself, though, has a few very real problems that will certainly irritate some users, including the lack of webcam, SD card slot and USB port.  There's a distinct lack of accessories in the box too.  You should also know that the iPad can't get going by itself: you'll need a computer with iTunes to activate it for the first time.  That means it's hard, if not impossible, to pitch it as a lightweight, simplified computer.  What's more, Apple is aiming the iPad at a very wide range of consumers, not all of whom will necessarily have their own computers.

The whole experience of using the iPad goes some way to making up for these technical problems, but it also means that you have to buy into Apple's vision.  For now though, we'll have to wait a little longer before we can really understand the iPad, how it works, what its strengths are and just how detrimental its weaknesses will be.  In the next few months, competitors like JooJoo and a new final version of the Archos 9 should be on their way, followed by Android tablet PCs from Acer, Adam and even Google, along with a reinvention of the HP Slate with Palm's WebOS.