It’s here! I just spent the weekend with my New Apple iPad: 16GB WiFi model (I’ll also review the WiFi+3G model when it ships) and wanted to give you my in-depth review. It’s exciting! As a matter of fact my buddy Bruce was waiting at his office on Saturday for his iPad to be delivered and when the UPS guy got there, they started talking and the UPS guy shared with him how people were following him in their cars and begging him to give them their iPads early before getting to their homes. I can’t think of too many products that cause this kind of frenzy. See my Unboxing Video here (it’s different than any other iPad unboxing video you’ve seen
) On to the review and keep in mind that I’ve only had the iPad for two days, so I haven’t touched every single feature yet, but here’s what I’ve seen and touched so far…

The Hardware
The iPad is another example of Apple’s attention to detail. Everything from the packaging to the actual design of the device is top notch. There are just a few hardware buttons. The home button is there just like on the iPhone and iPod touch as well as hardware buttons for the volume controls on the right side, on/off switch on top, a screen/rotation lock on the right and built-in speaker on the bottom as well as headphone jack and microphone on top.
My first impression when I picked it up out of the box was “it feels heavy!” Although it’s only 1.5 lbs, I was looking at it from a “hold it with one hand while reading” angle. Since it’s a book reader, I would want to hold it with one hand while flipping the pages with the other. I would be easily fatigued if I had to hold it in one hand for more than a few minutes. Holding it with two hands won’t be an issue and holding it with one hand as long as you have your knee or a table to rest on should be fine.
The iPad comes with a USB sync/charging cable and a wall charger.
It’s FAST! The iPad is VERY RESPONSIVE. I haven’t seen any lags whatsoever. Photos, Apps and everything I’ve tried so far have been very speedy!
Battery Life – So far so good. Keep in mind that testing for a weekend is not real-world regular use. However, I can easily see this thing going for 10 hours straight. I haven’t run it all the way down yet, so I’ll have to report back later on the actual battery life I get when I using it under normal conditions. Also very few will run it for 10 hours straight without a break.
Wi-Fi - The iPad takes advantage of 802.11n. So both range and network speed are GREAT! I must also remind you that this is the WiFi version and therefore will only connect to the internet via a WiFi hotspot. I know that sounds like a “duh” statement, but there seems to be a lot of confusion over the difference between the two models: WiFi and the WiFi+3G model that’s coming out later this month.
The Built-In Apps

They are Freaking Amazing! Apple has completely redone all of the built-in Apps. So your Contacts, Calendar, Photos, Mail, etc. Apps are not only taking advantage of the larger screen size, but they are both graphically gorgeous and reworked to let you do more because of the bigger size and faster processor. Also I found at least one new feature in the Calendar App that isn’t there on the iPhone. It’s actually one of my biggest pet peeves with the iPhone calendar App. In the iPad Calendar you can UNCHECK the calendars you don’t want to look at. For example, let’s say that I want to see both my work and home calendars AND my Holidays calendar, but I don’t want to see my non-profit and kid’s school calendars. Now I can simply uncheck the ones that I don’t want to see and have a single calendar view of the ones I do want to see (just like in iCal on the Mac!).
The Photos App is functionally amazing, but also adds a much requested feature and that’s the ability to play music during the slideshow. Now you can choose a song from your iPad and have it play while your slideshow plays.
Little things - There are so many little things that I discover every time I pick it up. For example, you can have TWO desktop pictures. One will be displayed while the iPad is locked when you wake it up and other is displayed in the background of your Apps. This is handy for creating a picture that displays your Name and Contact info while it’s locked, but that doesn’t have to be the picture behind your Apps!
Surfing the Web
Steve Jobs referred to the iPad as “the best browsing experience you’ve ever had! Way better than a laptop, way better than a smartphone” Wow, that’s a tall order and while the iPad is very nice. It’s NOT the best web browsing experience ever. You can’t call something that can’t display a large quantity of sites “the best web experience ever” PERIOD. You can say “it’s really awesome”, you can say “the future is HTML 5 and we’re ready”, but without Adobe Flash support, TODAY the iPad is a “broken” web browsing experience. I’m a techie guy and I understand what’s happening when I go to a site and the content doesn’t display because the iPad doesn’t have Flash support. However, to the average Joe, they’re going to become quickly frustrated when they go to their favorite sites and content is either missing or they can’t access the site at all. As a matter of fact to further hide this from the user Safari on the iPad now just displays a big empty white box (see the For the Photographers section below) where the Flash content would be. So if you didn’t know something was supposed to be there you wouldn’t think about it. I’m not here to defend Flash. Flash is by no means perfect. However, if the cheapest Netbook on the planet can see all of the sites out there and the iPad can’t, then the iPad is NOT the best web browsing experience. See my Cons section below on more of my thoughts on Flash and the iPad. Now let’s move on, the Safari experience is very nice for the sites it displays. It’s fast and even gives me my same Bookmarks bar that I have in Desktop Safari.
One pleasant surprise I got was going to Facebook.com from my iPad. I’m so used to either using the Facebook App or getting the mobile site in Safari, that I was actually quite pleased when the regular Facebook page came up in Safari on the iPad. Other than not being able to play Facebook videos (they require Flash), I actually liked the experience BETTER than the native iPhone Facebook App. There were always things you could do on Facebook.com that you couldn’t do in the native App. Don’t get me wrong. I hope they update the App with a kick-butt iPad version, but in the meantime I’m quite content to use Facebook in Safari on the iPad.