Apple iPad review

At about 700g, the iPad is heavier than you might expect; you’ll want to rest it on something. The weight is justified by its beautifully solid feel – there’s none of the discomfiting flex of most laptop screens – and long battery life, quoted at ten hours and certainly enough to get through a full day. It does take a while to top up, using the supplied 10W power plug: it wouldn’t charge from our iPhone adaptor or powered USB hub.

The built-in speaker isn’t stereo, but sounds good and fills a room. There’s also a stereo headphone socket (no headphones are included). An iPhone-style dock is the only other port; you don’t get a memory card slot, and a USB adaptor for digital cameras costs £25, which is a bit cheeky.

Obviously there’s no keyboard. At your desk, you can connect one via Bluetooth or buy Apple’s Keyboard Dock, a £55 unit that holds the iPad at a comfortable angle, charges it, and provides a standard Mac keyboard. On the move, the onscreen virtual keyboard is exactly the same size (in landscape view) and impressively easy to type on, although you have to click to a secondary layout for numbers and additional punctuation.

The 9.7in multi-touch screen uses the same technologies as the iPhone 3GS, and works flawlessly. At 1024 x 768 pixels, the resolution is comfortable for most tasks, and movies look great, either letterboxed or cropped to full screen. It’s nowhere near as pin-sharp as the iPhone 4’s Retina Display, but beats most screens for clarity and brightness.

Behind all this is Apple’s specially designed A4 processor, which is fast enough to make the iPad smoothly responsive.

Operating system and user interface

If you’ve used an iPhone or iPod touch, the user interface is identical. The Home screen, accessed by pressing the unit’s only button, shows icons for your apps, with more accessed by swiping across. Turning the unit rotates the display between landscape (horizontal) and portrait (vertical) orientations; there’s a switch to prevent unwanted rotation.

You touch an icon to run an app, and go back to the Home screen to switch tasks. This can be frustrating if you’re trying to do two things at once, and sometimes one task leads you to another – such as clicking a web link in an app – leaving no immediate way to go back. Fortunately, most apps open almost instantly and restore whatever you were doing. You’re alerted to new emails or texts while using any app, and the iPod app will continue to play audio (but not videos) while you use other apps.

Web browsing is great. The iPad is much less unwieldy than a laptop, yet big enough to view sites comfortably. The controversial lack of Flash support isn’t the killer it might seem; YouTube and BBC iPlayer work fine, for example. Still, you may miss other video-on-demand services, games and interactives, and you can’t run Java applets either, though websites using JavaScript work fine.

The iPad will get a free update to iOS 4, the operating system introduced with the iPhone 4, most likely in November. Among other enhancements, this will allow apps to multitask and perhaps share the screen. Having this to look forward to assuages some of the concerns about the iPad’s limitations.

The fact remains that it’s not intended to replace your main computer, and indeed you need a Mac or PC running iTunes to plug it into for setup and syncing. Not trying to do too much – for example, there’s no file manager like the Mac OS X Finder or Windows Explorer – keeps the OS simple and pretty foolproof. It won’t suit users who like to tinker, but why tinker when it just works?

Apps and services

The default apps include Apple’s Safari browser, Mail email client, Calendar and Contacts, which can all sync with their siblings on your Mac, or with Google’s web services or Microsoft’s PC equivalents. If you subscribe to Apple’s MobileMe (£59 a year), it’s all seamless; without it, various levels of sync are possible depending on the third-party services you’re using.

Almost all iPhone apps also work on the iPad. You can run them at iPhone size or pixel-doubled to almost full-screen. New apps designed (or redesigned) for iPad tend to cost more, but under £3 is still typical. You download them from the App Store either on the iPad or in iTunes on your Mac or PC.

Besides games and the full gamut of apps, the iPad lends itself well to magazines. Most are currently facsimiles of printed editions, which look OK but are awkward to read: the screen is less than half an A4 page, and small text isn’t easily legible, so you’re constantly panning and zooming to read. We prefer mags redesigned for iPad, such as Wired and TIME.

iBooks, a free app from Apple, offers a rapidly growing range of free and paid-for books displayed in a standard format, with a choice of fonts and sizes; PDFs can also be viewed this way. Amazon’s Kindle app, also free, supports a rival library of over half a million titles.

The iPad is generally seen as a device for consuming rather than creating content, but Apple’s Pages, Numbers and Keynote – collectively known as iWork – provide word processing/desktop publishing, spreadsheet and presentation functions for £5.99 each, and there are some highly capable creative apps available, especially in music production.

Which model?

You can buy the iPad ready for a 3G data SIM or with WiFi only. 3G adds £100 to the price and needs a network tariff, although, since you’re buying the iPad outright and don’t need voice minutes, there’s no need to commit to a contract. You can’t share your iPhone SIM or tether your iPad to an iPhone for network access.

But you’re most likely to use your iPad when you stop and sit down, and many places you sit down will have WiFi. If you buy WiFi-only and then find you need 3G, you can always add a mobile dongle. 3G USB sticks won’t work, but a MiFi box, which connects to a cellphone network and creates a portable WiFi hotspot, is ideal. 3’s costs £50 on pay as you go.

The only functionality exclusive to the 3G iPad is GPS: the WiFi-only unit can’t get a satellite fix on your location. It still comes with Google Maps, which can tell where you are by triangulating nearby WiFi base stations; this works well in built-up areas, though maps will only download if you’re connected via WiFi.

Memory is the other difference between models. We’d recommend at least 32GB, because the iPad invites high-capacity content: the Wired magazine app, for example, uses half a gigabyte per issue.

Conclusion

Yes, it’s technically a big iPod touch. But what it feels like is a compact, sturdy and very usable portable computer that doesn’t pester you with security updates, never gets a virus, doesn’t crash (if an app screws up, it just quietly closes), and has over 150,000 apps available at tiny prices. It’s expensive compared to a netbook, and limited compared to a similarly priced laptop – but it has big usability advantages over both. As the Dr Pepper people say: try it, you might like it.