iPad Falls Short

The title says it... I am disappointed with the iPad. Well, actually it has been only four days since it arrived (I wanted it earlier but the volcano messed my plans). The bar of expectations has probably been raised too high. So what is up with the device?

First it is very cool. Probably the coolest gadget on Earth. A little heavier than expected, but feels great in hand. Feels even better in the original case. The case itself is one of the smartest designs I have ever seen. It covers the screen. It folds back 180 degrees. It can be folded to raise the angle of the device sitting on your laps. Or it can be used as a table stand when you want the Pad to act as a photo frame. Cool :). The on-screen keyboard works better than expected. I am writing this column sitting on a train with the iPad on my lap. It is the best virtual touch keyboard I have ever used. The screen is very good. The touch interface works brilliantly. The battery life is awesome - full day on full brightness.

So could the hardware be improved? Certainly yes, but it already is on a top level. There is really nothing to complain about. And nobody has ever done it better so far. I mean the mix of screen, weight, battery life, input interface. Almost perfect. Two little improvements I would add are: BlackBerry - style "touch and hold to get a capital letter" option and dedicated screen brightness control. Yes, there is an ambient light sensor, but you need different settings for slideshows (brightness and vivid) and different for reading a book (dimmed). So I find myself often going to the setup screen to change the brightness.

Speaking of hardware / system issues, one thing Windows users should note is poor quality of text rendering on the otherwise gorgeous iPad display. Clearly (pun intended) the iPad does not support the ClearType technology. It is understandable, as ClearType is owned by Microsoft, but this has been a big setback for me. Certainly a point Microsoft should use to demonstrate their slates display content “so much better” than the competition.

Where is the heart of the problem of my disappointment then? It is the software.

It all starts with the iTunes. The iPad is a slave device. It cannot live a life on its own. When you turn it on after unboxing for the first time, you can do nothing with it. You have to connect it to a master computer (Mac or Windows) running iTunes. The connection is by means of a white cable, which reminds me the old days of 1980’s, when we used to "network" computers with serial null-modem cables. When connected, iTunes does some initialization work and offers you to upload music and photos to the iPad. And here is the second problem. The process is very slow. Transferring music, it shows at least some progress, but when it gets to photos, it stalls. Mine was sitting doing nothing for more than an hour. And then it announced, it had some 12 thousand photos to "optimize". Strange, as I thought my photos were already quite optimal, but it seemed Apple had different opinion on that. The "optimization" process was running at a speed of about 40 photos a minute, so I quickly figured out it needed about 5 hours to finish the job. Too much. Especially as there is no way to use the iPad when it syncs. It only displays the "slide to cancel" message. I canceled, planning to rerun the job in the night. But this experience was repelling. You wait for this glory gadget for months (or even years in my case). Then it ships. Then the volcano erupts. Finally you get it and it wants five hours on its own to do some "optimization". Grrrrrrr...

The iTunes - like it or not - becomes now your daily mantra. Anything you want to do with the iPad requires iTunes. And this software is so poorly designed. It started years ago as a console to manage music on iPods. But then iPods evolved into iPhones and iPhones into iPads, which in fact are full blown portable computers, while the iTunes concept has remained the same... Be a master and have its slave on a cable leash... It is a bad fit now. iPad should synch everything over its Wi-Fi connection and, more importantly, do it in the background. Tethering it to the host machine over a cable is no longer in vogue. Microsoft had this concept (remember ActiveSync?) about ten years ago, but now Windows phones sync over either Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. Even Blackberries can do this sans wires. Hello Apple...!

In the anticipation of the arrival of the iPad, I had purchased a number of applications beforehand. iTunes downloaded them charging my credit card accordingly. I spent some $100 for those apps (count that in when you estimate your iPad investment). The apps are cool. There are thousands of them. Most are still available only for iPhones (iPad can run them, but they look ugly). So to prevent an aesthetics shock, buy only the genuine iPad apps (dubbed sometimes high-res or HD). After consulting a friend of mine, who is a Mac addict, I got the X-Plane flight simulator, the Formula 1 app, a game of chess and a bunch of others. Later on I realized I needed the iWorks suite (Pages, Numbers and Keynote) too. That set me back another $30. They are all very cool. The coolest one probably is The Elements, a beautiful interactive periodical table. My kid also loves playing the X-Plane.

I also got myself the Amazon Kindle reader application. The Kindle I like. It is simple to use and most importantly makes me comfortable buying Amazon ebooks, as I can read them on my laptop, my dedicated Kindle reader and now the iPad. It is not so with the iBooks app, that is very cool, but closed only to Apple platform. With Kindle I am certain whatever device I will end up in future (Android is now the likely contender, keep on reading to see why…), my Kindle ebooks will be available there. Good strategy, Amazon!

The apps are great. Have I said this already? Yes they are cool. My kid loves them. But I realized I really do not need them. May be to show to people how cool the iPad is. But more than ever, I realized, I needed the Web. The iPad comes with Apple's Web browser - the Safari. Safari has been the key factor behind the success of the iPhone, delivering the best mobile browsing experience. So the expectations for the iPad have already been elevated very high. And disappointment is even higher. Safari experience on the iPad is far inferior to the current standard I am used to, which is the Firefox turbo on Windows. By "turbo" I mean several add-ons, which make Firefox the browser platform of choice. The first one is the AdBlock Plus. It does what it says. Removes advertisements completely. Even the Google's sponsored links. And the entire sidebar of Facebook ads. You get more screen real estate for the content, more battery life (CPU cycles are not wasted to animate the ads), and of course, much less distraction. I just cannot imagine living without the ABP now. Once you try it, there is no way back. The second Firefox add-on I use is the Tree Style Tabs. It allows positioning the browser tabs on the left side of the application's window, which is especially handy on panoramic (16:10) displays that are now very common. I usually keep about 20 tabs opened on average, and TST is a great way to organize them. The last of my Firefox turbochargers is the Weave. It silently synchronizes all tabs, settings, cookies, and browsing history with the Cloud. So any other machine I run the Firefox on, it comes up with exact copy of my browsing session. Just think how lovely it would be to have this kind of functionality... To resume on a tablet the exact multi-tab browsing session you left on your big computer. Yes it would, but Safari on the iPad does not even have tabbed browsing to start with... Not to mention ad blocking add-ons or cloud based session synchronization.

Soon, when I got to the Web, I have found many other annoying limitations the iPad browser has (wonder why Steve Jobs still claims it does so many things better than a laptop... maybe he should use Firefox from time to time to be able to judge it better?). The glorified HTML 5 support is still not perfect - see the cover photo of YouTube embedded in a Google Reader page. But for me the most annoying issue is the lack of support for rich text html edit boxes. Due to this limitation Google Docs that I use heavily, work only in read-only mode, which is a big problem for me, making me think of other tablet computers, likely the ones running Android. Android will handle Google Docs perfectly, I take this for granted. Blogger does not work either. Yes I write this column now on the iPad, but have to use the bare html view, as the "compose" rich text view is not supported by Safari. Editing larger pieces of text is a problem even outside Safari. And not because of the lack of physical keyboard (the on–screen one works really well), but because there are no cursor keys. Simple task of fixing a typo a few lines above becomes monumental and annoying. Apple has tried to avoid the concept of a cursor, but it appears to be central to any document editing process.

Now when I saved my unfinished work in Blogger, I cannot continue with it on the iPad. The editing windows opens, but there is no way to get to the end of the typed text. Touch scrolling scrolls the entire page, not the text in the edit box. The rescue comes by means of the Pages application and copy / paste. But I would never call this is done “so much better than on a laptop”.

Flash does not work either, but you already know that. What has surprised me though, is how many sites use Flash, not only to display video, but many various components on interactive pages. It will take years until they all move to Flash-less design. Until that happens you are left in the cold with the iPad. On the other hand Google is integrating Flash deeply into their browser, so Chrome on Android potentially offers even better Web experience from the day one.
I also had problems getting to some sites I use daily. They are not mainstream, but use legitimate html constructs, and Safari somehow has problems with them. This is a potential show stopper, as it is hard for me to imagine right now going on a month - long vacations and not being able to access certain discussion forums I read daily.

There is no printing support and no way to create a PDF snapshot of whatever you have on a screen – be it a document or an electronic flight ticket, I usually back up as PDF. Also when somebody emails you a ZIPped file, you are toast.

Having said all that, I still like the device in some scenarios. Not much has changed since the day it was announced for the first time by Steve Jobs. It is great to read the morning paper, taking little space on the table, fits well beside a coffee cup. It is handy to do casual web browsing on a sofa. It is a great photo frame and a nice Twitterfall client (provided your budget can handle such extravagance). I also found it OK for a one day business trip. It is small enough to fit in a crowded economy-class seat and the battery is powerful enough to stop thinking of turning it off at all. But for anything more than that, I will be gladly coming back to my “Windows 7 / Firefox turbo” SSD Lenovo X200s laptop. It has been unbeatable for 18 months now.

Also my iPad already has its best friend. It is the Huawei E5 personal Wi-Fi mobile router. It makes any iPad a 3G one. Can even handle several at the same time, without the hysteria of micro-SIM cards.