Hands-on iPad

I’ll save you the usual unboxing video – it’s as usual a perfectly packaged product, you wouldn’t expect less from Apple anyhow. I’ve been quite unsettled on the iPad from the start. It’s heavy, and there is no clear use case or killer apps yet on it. Nevertheless, I can feel something in the air, and needed to give it a first shot.

OK, web browsing is nice but this can’t be the killer app, especially since quite a lot of interactive site do not render properly on the iPad (wanted to book a hotel, and failed). The big screen size really enable a better use of the applciations, especially when those are redesigned for it, such as Evernote which is a real beauty to fire up and play with.

The eBook side is disappointing, the screen being highly reflective makes it really uncomfortable to use and at the end when it comes to reading text, my eBook (Sony PRS505) does a much better job. But where the iPad really blows mind is when it comes to displaying unstructured data such as comics or newspaper. The Marvel and Le Monde applications are simply mindblowing, and are truly reinventing their medium through the iPad, while keeping the paper experience present, they manage to fullty take advantage of the device to enhance the end-user experience. In the case of le monde for instance, I always found the reading of the pdf version on the PC lousy, and would stick to the full text articles instead, while the iPad app managed to bring those two worlds together again.

I expect the gaming to be something huge also, since the big screen will be very prone to social interactions around the device, yet I did not get a epiphany on this topic while trying out a few games.