If you are reading this iPad review, you are probably still wondering if you should spend $499 or more on an iPad, and you are looking for some answers. The iPad is still just sold in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany and Italy. There is no release for the rest of Europe, including Norway.

Context

I want to start with the fact that I don’t see many people that really need an iPad. I would more then survive with the iPhone and a laptop, and get my work done with them. I would also be able to read most articles and play most of the games with these two devices. But the rest of this article will tell you how brilliant I found the iPad to be! The usefulness of the iPad is simply depending on your lifestyle. I spend most of my time in front of a powerful desktop computer (a PC) with two 24″ displays. I often do project work and meetings outside of the office, and for that I have an ultraportable laptop with built in mobile broadband (Dell Latitude D4200) and I also have a MacBook Pro). On the go, I’m an active user of my iPhone, a lot of emails are answered from it, but tying longer emails is a pain.

The question is, when will I choose the iPad instead of a computer or the phone?

Design and build

The build quality is amazing. The aluminium back feels great under the finger and nothing feels cheap. The size seems to be just right, as the iPad fits perfectly in my hands.

On the device you will find an audio jack connector for headphones, and a microphone for apps that need it. The speaker is on the bottom of the device where the “Home” button is. And even the speaker sounds quite so OK!

A few words must be said about the screen. I laugh when I hear people say that the iPad is just a big iPod Touch. They are so true. It is an iPod Touch with the perfect screen (and CPU speed). The screen is sharp and colorful. The contrast and colors are amazing. I also want to mention that the brightness distribution is very stable regardless of the viewing angle. But, and there is a big but, I find the iPad to be a couch surfing device. It is not a device for sunny days out in the garden. You will then get to much reflections and hardly see a thing.

The screen can be rotated as on the iPhone, but you can now lock screen rotation. This makes it easier to read longer articles on the device.

I have been using classical eReaders for 2-3 years, and I often hear people fear that reading from an LCD display would cause headaches and eyestrain. I can only speak for myself, but I have not experienced any eyestrain, but I prefer reading books on eInk displays.

Reading books

iBooks and other ebook reading applications will be reviewed in a dedicated article, when the iBooks application is updated to also support the PDF format. The support is announced and the application will most likely be updated within the next couple of weeks.

User Interface

Tablet PCs are not something new. They have at least been around for 6-7 years, just that nobody used them. And the reason for that is most likely that we just put a desktop OS on them, with few or no changes. The same mistake seems to have been done with netbooks. Putting a heavy weight champion on a lightweight is not a good idea, it’s a death match! Apple did the quite opposite thing, as they put their mobile phone OS on to a tablet, not only is it amazingly fast, but it is also far more simple to use then any desktop operating system on the market! Everything you do, can be done on the touch screen. And no pen is needed!

And let us just state it: For those who have used an iPhone or an iPod Touch, there is no learning curve whatsoever!

Virtual keyboard

This is what prevents the iPad from replacing the laptop! I got introduced to virtual keyboards and “thumb typing” with the iPhone. I find it is easier to type on the iPad then on the iPhone, either is in portrait or landscape mode. But I guess that it cannot compete with a 10″ Netbook keyboard, nor with a full-sized keyboard.

Personally, I find the iPad perfect casual typing (one or two paragraph email replies), but I would not dream of typing long documents or blog entries on this device.

Applications

The iPad can run older iPhone applications, but you really don’t want to do that. As iPhone applications now get rewritten, you will be able to run them full screen on the iPad as well. In fact, many of the new iPhone applications can been seen as “universal” apps, that you can run full screen both on the iPhone and the iPad. And if the application is not free, you can buy it once and install it on both your devices. Funnily enough I found some of these “universal” apps to be even cooler and simpler to use on the iPad. There already some applications that only exists for the iPad and more will come! In the time of writing this article, the AppStore passed 10.000 applications for the iPad.

There is no Flash for the iOS, so nothing slowing down loading the newspapers’ frontpage. And I honestly don’t miss it. HTML 5 works well enough for me, so hopefully newspapers will adopt their pages for mobile devices fast.

Writing on the iPad is a challenge for the first 2-3 days. I prefer writing in landscape mode, and I guess I can call it “thumb” writing. The iPad is the perfect for writing e-mails, as these texts are not to long.

Weather

We all talk about the weather, and the iPad doesn’t come with the Yahoo! Weather widget that is included on the iPhone. So one of the first things I looked for, for the iPad, was a weather application. I must admit that I miss Yr.no (available for the iPhone). But I found a visual masterpiece, not to informative, but a beautiful application. The application I talk about is Weather HD:

I also tested the free AccuWeather application for iPad, but I found it be just as big a mess as their webpages. Shit in, shit out! Sorry…

Social applications

There is still no Facebook for the iPad, and I prefer the web page instead of using the iPhone app. There are tons of Twitter applications available, I chose TweetDeck, cause of it’s clean and clear interface. But I have more or less lost interest in Twitter… I’ve dropped installing GoWalla, mainly cause the wifi models of the iPad lack GPS.

Newspapers

More then writing, I like reading on the iPad. It’s more a consuming device. I have almost stopped reading news on computers. Here are some of the newspapers I read daily:

BBC News

This is currently my prefered application for reading news, simply due to its vertical home page layout (and of course the great content). I miss Norwegian content in dedicated applications, but I am sure they will come as soon as the iPad is launched in Norway. We have no release date yet.

The application is personalisable and offers text news in English and other languages, story videos, 60-second video bulletins, full-screen video, breaking news alerts and offline syncing. The navigation is great, and I espescially like how they have implemented a radio channel and the possibility to easily share news content with friends and colleagues.

The New York Times Editors’ Choice

The app is free of charge, and offers a selection of news, opinion and feature articles chosen by Times editors that can be downloaded automatically to the tablet device. It delivers two pages of content with the top eight to ten articles in latest news, business, technology, opinion and feature sections with accompanying videos and photo slideshows. The application reminds me a bit of The Times Reader 2.0 (an Adobe Air application).

Die Welt

I love to read German once in a while, so one of the first newspaper applications that I downloaded, was Die Welt. It is as the BBC News application, absolutely fantastic. The way that I have implemented navigation, picture galleries and videos, makes you go wow! The application represents a multimedia edition of the newspaper, and makes use of all the possibilities that iPad gives newspaper houses.

I’ve heard that VG plan to release something for the iPad in September this year.

Reading articles

Google Reader

On desktop computers I prefer reading Google Reader from within a browser. But on my iPhone, I found it to be easier to read RSS feeds from within a dedicated application. My favourite application is Reeder. When I started writing this review, Reeder was still not available for the iPad, but it is now available also as a dedicated application. Sadly not as an universal application. It seems that I will have to buy a lot of these applications twice.

The first week I used the lite version of FeeddlerRSS, which is fairly good, but lacks possibility to send an article to InstaPaper. That feature is only available in the full version. And if I had to buy the full version to get the functionality, I could just as well go for Reeder for iPad. So I did …

InstaPaper

Often I find that I don’t have the time to read longer, interesting articles during work hours. Yeah, I guess that that goes without saying. Here’s where InstaPaper comes handy. I’ve been using this cloud service for more or less a year now, and it has become my preferred way of reading news. I mostly read these synced news items on my iPhone on the subway to and from work, or I sync it to a traditional eReader device through Calibre. Since I’ve gotten my hands on the iPad, I haven’t even bothered opening Calibre. I pull the content down directly with the InstaPaper application on the iPad.

Magazines

I see delivering magazines as a possible new market for iTMS. Wired has shown some of the possibilities that the iPad gives print houses. I hate american magazines cause of the insane amount of advertisements in them. The few articles that I found in the Wired magazine, had a beautiful layout. I found navigation and overview were far better in some of the newspaper applications that I use. Die Welt and BBC News are better examples on what the iPad can do for magazines.

When it comes to magazines and advertisements, I guess big changes will get introduced with the next version of iOS for the iPad, as I guess Apple to introduce iAds for the iPad as well. Here it makes more sense then on the iPhone.

Office applications

OneTeam

The best ever XMPP client I have ever tried for a mobile device. Great on the iPhone, even better on the iPad! The application also support listing of all available chat rooms, something that both Adium and iChat don’t do.

Todo

Just as OneTeam, Todo is better on the iPad then on the iPhone. OneTeam is an universal application, but Todo on the other hand is sold as two separate applications.

With Todo installed on both the iPad and the iPhone, together with the cloud syncing service Toodeledo, I dare say that I have never had more control over my tasks, private and work! I need it, cause Lotus Notes Travel doesn’t sync my todos, only calendar entries (meetings)…

Pages

I love iWorks for Mac, and have therefor also bought Pages for the iPad. I’ve only started playing with it, and find it to be a great applications for writing down your first ideas for a longer document and for reading through documents one last time before sending them off.

Viewing and editing photos

Photo fx Ultra

Even photo editing is more fun on an iPad. Tiffen’s feature rich photo app gives you glass filters, optical lab processes and photographic effects at your fingertips.

Curling up on the sofa and giving your family photos a professional finish has never been easier!

Running iPad on a enterprise network

We have developed profiles for our university’s services (wlan, e-mail, vpn, ldap and Lotus Notes), to make them as easy for the enduser to configure as possible. Configuring these services is actually now done in a minute or two! It cannot be done much easier. As you already read above, we use XMPP for instant messaging internally and with external partners. We have chosen to mainly implement open or industrial standards for all our IT services, so e-mail is making use of IMAP and SMTP (with ssl/tls), people search of LDAP, VPN makes use of IPSec, and WLAN uses WPA Enterprise (802.1x). For Lotus Notes Traveler, we make use of Active Sync. It’s almost so I would say that the iPad is fully supported on our university, except from the possibility of remotely deleting the content on these devices.

I have still not tried any of the iWorks applications for iPad, to do Office related work, and for now I am still using Touch Term for iPhone with a scaled window. Not the best solution, and I hope that somebody will soon come with a dedicated SSH client for the iPad.

Getting more out of the device with acccessories

I guess that there already is a number of accessories can be connected to the device, and there is an iPad to VGA connector at the Apple Store. So if you plan to use Keynote on the iPad or work a lot with photos, you should spend a few extra bucks on getting the possibility to connect the iPad to a projector. The iPad’s resolution is XGA (1024×768).

Tethering with a mobile phone

It is not possible to tether the iPad through your iPhone, but if you have a Nokia or Windows Mobile phone (and soon with Android), tethering should be fairly easy and a nice way to get online with iPads without a inbuilt mobile broadband connection. I am using a Nokia N82 with the commercial version of Joiku Hotspot software. I hope Apple with implement wifi tethering in a future release. I would then be able to retire the Nokia phone completely. It is only kept for this one single purpose!

Accessibility

This is a topic that suddently appeared to me. A colleague of mine is highly myopic, and he almost begged me to let him try the iPad. After a minute I could see why! The iPad comes with some nice accessability functionality. VoiceOver is nicely implemented, so is also White on Black.