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
iPad Autocorrection: Withholding the Answer
In my Nexus One review I talked about how great the iPhone’s autocorrection system is. About how it just lets you type and forget about spelling or punctuation errors. I figured this would translate very well to the iPad. Unfortunately, I was wrong
The autocorrect engine on the iPad is far less aggressive than on the iPhone. You have to pay much more attention to what you're typing here. The iPhone, if trained well, can usually guess what you're trying to say based on it's live dictionary and key position. On the iPad, it doesn’t guess nearly as much.
On the iPhone simple things are autocorrected but out of a desire to be less intrusive Apple has backed off on the iPad. Given that iPad users will most likely be typing a whole lot more than iPhone users, an aggressive autocorrect engine is probably a bad thing.
About the only thing the autocorrection does as well as on the iPhone is automatically capitalizing the p in iPad. While i understand why Apple made the autocorrection engine more lax, I would like to have the option to restore at least some of it's potency.
The spelling correction in Pages ($9.99 Apple word processing app) is also odd. For example I typed te and the only correction option it gave me was et, not the. Some other oddities I ran into in Pages are below:
Of course I didn't mean to type box, just ix
I've? No, I meant Vie
Hmm, works or woof's?
Also missing on the iPad's keyboard are the pop up letters you get whenever you hit a key on the iPhone. Apple tried to make this keyboard work as much as possible like a normal keyboard but in doing so left out some worthwhile features from the iPhone.
The weaker autocorrect isn't a terrible issue since the keyboard is a lot bigger than the iPhone’s but it does mean that you can't just type and forget. It also means that most of your fast typing won't be properly punctuated. There's no apostrophe key on the default keyboard you have to bring up the numerical mode to get access to that. I hope you don't like using contractions while typing fast.
Quickly formatting text is also irritating. There are no keyboard shortcuts, so while your fingers spend all of their time at the bottom of the screen apps like Pages still behave like a desktop app in that all of its options are at the top of the screen. It's quicker to type without caring about details and then edit later if you're trying to get something polished.
Selecting text, on the other hand, is awesome on the iPad. Double tap a word to select it. Triple tap to select an entire paragraph. From there you can drag the selection box's corners to enclose more. This is one of those situations where the iPad actually improves the experience over the notebook/desktop norm.
I set out to write this review in it's entirety on the iPad, unfortunately if I were to actually do so I would undoubtedly suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome or spend three times as long formatting the review. Steve wasn’t lying when he said that if you wanted to do a lot of typing you should buy the keyboard dock. For emails, web browsing and even normal sized documents it’s fine, for writing and formatting huge articles however, use a laptop.
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zodiacfml - Thursday, April 8, 2010 - link
Another quality review, useful as trying the device myself.I'm not buying Apple products but you touched on features that it should have.
One is the ability to stand on its own to function as a picture frame, movie screen, and reader while someone is eating or something else.
Support for mouse device and keyboard when it can already stand on its own.
Support for uploading media such as video and photos from either flash cards or directly from cameras. it is such a good device to use with cameras.
one more thing, they could get the intel atom cpu once it gets to a smaller process to improve size and energy efficiency.
Spivonious - Thursday, April 8, 2010 - link
Anand, I love your writing and have read the site since the GeoCities days, but please learn the difference between "lay" and "lie".crimson117 - Thursday, April 8, 2010 - link
My biggest pet peeve with the iPhone UI is the lack of an indicator for when an app is visible but busy processing something and not currently accessible.The default Notepad app on the iPhone 3G is a great example - as soon as you tap the icon, the yellow Notepad interface pops right up. However, it actually takes several seconds to finish loading until you can tap to edit a note or tap the (+) sign to start a new note. There's no indicator at all of when the loading is complete - you have to keep tapping periodically until it finally works.
The same is true for resizing a web page using multitouch - there's no indicator that your input has been received but it's going to take a few moments to make it happen.
In Windows 7 when an app is "thinking" and thus you can't interact with it, your mouse pointer becomes a a little circle (aka an hourglass). If an app is ever extremely busy thinking, the app may even gray out to indicate that even Windows can't get it to respond at that time.
The iPhone's lack of this feature just smells of Apple trying to make the device appear on the surface to be more responsive than it really is. Perhaps you'll question whether you tapped correctly, and won't realize that the device is just slower than you expect it to be.
archcommus - Thursday, April 8, 2010 - link
This article, like your others, despite being 22 (!) pages long, is a quick, refreshing read. It feels more like you're talking about your experiences and less like you're writing an article as a journalist (which can make some other long reviews a little boring). Also seemed pretty unbiased and highlighted the good and bad. Another solid article, thanks.Mumrik - Thursday, April 8, 2010 - link
Hehe, this isn't a big deal - it's just amusing:"Although there's no mute button, holding the volume down rocker for 2 seconds mutes the device instantly."
Nope. Sounds to me like it takes about two seconds to mute the device :)
AstroGuardian - Thursday, April 8, 2010 - link
Good one. My thought exactly...leospagnol - Thursday, April 8, 2010 - link
I'm planning to buy one of them when I travel to US next month. THe Eee 1001P is $ 280.00, and the iPad $499.00 at least. I usually read more than I write during classes and I have wifi available during class. I'll probably buy the Eee, but wich do you think suits this task best?Mumrik - Thursday, April 8, 2010 - link
Imagine the iPad lying flat on your desk and then imagine the position you would have to sit in all lecture long if you wanted to be able to write.Then imagine how much of the time you'd have to look down at what you were writing because you didn't have the physical response of a keyboard to make touch typing easy.
Now imagine not being able to multitask.
It would not be a difficult choice for me - Anand said it himself - the iPad is generally not a laptop substitute.
videogames101 - Thursday, April 8, 2010 - link
I love the M3, great episode there.Good to know I can watch it on the iPad, lol.
AstroGuardian - Thursday, April 8, 2010 - link
As far as i remember, this was not mentioned in the review (the overheating problem):http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=18075
Personally i don't think it's worth commenting. It's not just the iPad but all other electronic devices will overheat when put out on the sun. And i wouldn't call it overheating but more like misuse.