Apple's iPad - The AnandTech Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi, Brian Klug & Vivek Gowri on April 7, 2010 9:39 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Mac
- Apple
- iPad
- Mobile
Stop and Smell the Roses Computing
In my original iPad piece i talked about how the couch surfing Internet device is something I'd wanted ever since i started AnandTech 13 years ago. It's sort of ironic that when the day finally came that a company made what I wanted, I don't have the time to actually sit on my couch and browse the web. Such is life.
Since my job revolves around doing a lot online I rarely get the opportunity to chill and play online. Something the iPad is great at. That's not to say that it's totally useless for someone like me. In fact, despite the ergonomics issues I found myself typing a lot of this review on the iPad simply because it's nice to step away from the desk and more overwhelming computing interfaces.
When I'm writing sometimes a simple change of scenery helps clear my head. Using the iPad for writing, responding to emails or even browsing the web is like a virtual change of scenery. It forces you to take a slower and more focused pace. It's stop and smell the roses computing, but without being frustrating. You lose the stress of a more overwhelming compute experience, which if you spend most of your day working on the computer is nice. I don't want to get too flowery with language here but it is a more intimate setting. The screen can be closer to you and you interact with it directly. This is particularly evident in web browsing. The line between browsing for work and fun for me is very blurry, so my browsing experience is rarely relaxed. The iPad fixes that.
The iPad is a double entendre of computing. On the surface it's a clear option for folks who only do the simplest things with computers. Look a little deeper and there's actually use for those of us who don't fall into that category. It's your computer away from computers. An analogous duality actually exists with the Mac OS and it's easy to use vs. powerful nature.
It's actually this relaxed computing aspect that I feel most tablet makers will get wrong. These devices aren't notebook replacements but in the quest to enable things like multitasking and more usage scenarios I'm afraid that the simplicity will be lost. This is the Android vs. iPhone debate I brought up in my Nexus One review. Apple has the simplicity part down pat, so it's competitors use features to differentiate. In doing so you often lose one of the major selling points of the Apple offering.
Part of the relaxed experience does have to do with the total lack of multitasking on the iPad. Short of playing MP3s while you work, you pretty much can't do more than one thing at a time with the iPad. This is not as frustrating as you'd expect partly due to the faster-than-iPhone speed of the device. But it is a problem, something I believe Apple will address in tomorrow's iPhone OS 4 preview.
The iPad is relaxing to use. The interface is clean and not overbearing, and by virtue of the touch interface it acts more as a natural extension of you than a separate computing device. Maintaining those things while addressing core problems of the iPhone OS (e.g. Notifications, multitasking) will be challenging for Apple.
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strikeback03 - Friday, April 9, 2010 - link
My carputer runs fine with temps in the car over 100*F.Mumrik - Thursday, April 8, 2010 - link
Man! You guys must really have been in a hurry to get this review up.It is long, critical and thorough as I expect from you, but there are quite a lot of grammatical errors and you repeat yourself a lot i places. :-D
Sunburn74 - Thursday, April 8, 2010 - link
Anand,When you read the rhetoric between the gtx 470/480 reviews, your most recent Macbook pro reviews, and your current iPad review, its clear the latter is by far the single largest fluff piece ever posted on this site. You seem to have forgotten that people come to your site for one reason. We are the unknowing consumers who turn to your impartial judgement with one, and only one question: should we buy it?
Ryan Smith's gtx 470/480 review was superb. He didn't write "I could see myself buying a $500 gtx 480 for my 4th PC on summer trips to my house in the hamptons where I don't have to be using my real desktop for any real work". He flat out said "Nvidia was too little, too late". He didn't try to sell anyone on what might possibly be on some distant horizon in the upcoming future if you had the extra money; he delineates whether or not people should buy the item right now.
When future potential arrives, then you write another article explaining how the landscape has changed. Anand, your latest article shamelessly bent over backwards to positively sell the iPad in this way. How about comparing the ipad to the ipod touch, the iphone, the blackberry, the android, and explaining if people who own these items that deeply saturate our society what the iPad means to them? How about answering the bottom line question of if I should go buy one right now or if I should wait? How about any statement, however remote it is, on what sort of competition the ipad will face and what that means to the consumer? Who are you serving here? The people? Apple? Or your personal beliefs towards tablet PCs as something you simply want to succeed despite obviously being in infancy?
Anand, don't lose that journalistic sense of justice that requires you tell your readers what they need to know, not how you might use the item if you had extra money for a vacation to australia.
vol7ron - Thursday, April 8, 2010 - link
A couple of annoyances in the past with the iPhone 3g (aside form no-Flash) has been (1) it's lingering keyboard, (2) safari drop down menu assistance, and (3) delayed shortcuts1:
An example of the lingering keyboard is when texting someone else. There is no way to hide/autohide the keyboard once it's open. For the text messaging you can go into "edit" mode or simply go back to "messages" page and then back to the text, but why make it hard? I know my IRC apps make it easy to hide the keyboard, by just touching the screen again, why can't Apple just add a button?
2:
While the scrollable, assisted, drop-down menu in Safari is neat, those long-texted options are inadequate. Especially for cases that start off with the same sentence; for instance:
"I am a customer that heard about this site ..." {offscreen: from the web}
"I am a customer that heard about this site ..." {offscreen: from a friend}
"I am a customer that heard about this site ..." {offscreen: from work}
-- basically, you can't see the off-screen stuff until selected. I don't understand that since Apple has made a zoomable, fluid, paging device.
3:
While certain shortcuts would be effective on the iPhone, I think it's the response time that's lacking. For instance, the touch-and-hold period button has a popup option that allows you to select the ellipsis (tri-dot). That would be effective if the popup was more instantaneous - instead, it's faster to type out 3 periods. It's these menus that I hope are still prevalent in the iPad keyboard, but have a better response time.
vol7ron
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PS: loved the review. I am thinking about getting an iPad now - as stated before, I will have to wait for a price drop. $500-1000 is not acceptable, especially given the amount of storage. I'd love to see this device price range reduced to around $250-500 (perhaps hopeful future thinking).
Locut0s - Thursday, April 8, 2010 - link
Looks like it. Nice if so!CSMR - Friday, April 9, 2010 - link
We are seeing that limited devices (iPhone, Windows Phone 7, iPad) have an appeal to many consumers, who just want to do a small and finite number of things with them. This type of device can be stylish and effective.But I think Anandtech and other tech sites should have a prejudice in favor of computers rather than locked down devices. Limited devices can be cool, and I'm not saying AnandTech shouldn't review them, but it should prefer systems that are not limited.
Rather than going along with the average consumer tech sites could show the market how to make unlimited systems (tablets running Win7, phones running OSes like android, windows mobile) better designed and more intuitive, and show users how to use these effectively.
The current proliferation of locked-down devices has some strengths but it is a threat to computing. We've been fortunate that computers have been so popular. What if most people no longer use computers, but devices, and the market caters to them? What if the computer market becomes like the console market? What will advanced users do?
Impulses - Friday, April 9, 2010 - link
Anand mentions that the iPad keeps performance decent by relying on solid state memory and a lightweight OS.... I'd like to see those iPad vs. netbook tests re-run against a netbook w/a SSD... I mean, a decent netbook plus a 40GB Intel X25-V is still cheaper than an iPad. ;)I realize that a $120 drive upgrade to a $300 computer isn't something the average consumer does, but it's pretty common amongst us geeks. /shrug Plus we've seen the X25-V as low as $99 (or $75 for the Kingston version). My X25-V gave my Acer Aspire One a nice kick in the pants, sure it doesn't make it play Flash video any better but it significantly improved multi-tasking, app loading, and hibernation.
A CULV laptop + a decent SSD wouldn't be much more expensive than some of the iPads after you factor in some of the options (stand, apps, 3G, higher capacities, etc). I realize they're not the same type of device, just trying to speak purely to the performance side of the argument here...
Impulses - Friday, April 9, 2010 - link
I wasn't quite done reading the article when I wrote that last post... The battery life numbers for the iPad are pretty impressive, heck even the 3GS numbers seem impressive compared to my 2nd gen iPod touch. I don't know if Plants vs Zombies is just poorly optimized, or if the reduced processing capabilities of my touch drain the battery faster, but I'm lucky if I can get more than two hours of the thing with that game. It just rapes the battery life...I guess one reason Apple might've skipped out on Moorestown would be battery life considerations, 'specially when playing back media... The degree to which many games seem to drain smartphone batteries these days makes me wonder why we even bother though, I can't possibly consider gaming on my smartphone if it means the battery's not gonna last me thru the day because of it... Despite the fact that this one of the few things I do like about the direction Apple has taken the iPhone OS in (the gaming environment/potential).
Mr Alpha - Friday, April 9, 2010 - link
I can of the top of my head think of two reasons why the iBooks app isn't installed by default.1. The iBookstore is US only, and the iPad is international. This means they would either have to ship the iPad with an app people can't use or have two sets of firmware, one for US and another one for the rest of the world.
2. The developer license agreement states that you can't duplicate functionality. So if they had included the iBooks app by default they would have had to either kick all other ereader apps and catch hell for it, or ignore it and come of a hypocritical while undermining their own license agreement.
dagamer34 - Friday, April 9, 2010 - link
The iBooks app does not come with the firmware of the iPad, it is a downloadable app like Remote and iDisk.