iPad includes hyberbole generator, first reviews show The first iPads reviews are up, pushing reviewers to their very limits in the search for superlatives worthy of the sublime magnificence bestowed upon them. How fortunate we are to live in an age when we can have a device that's "instantly compelling and elegant" and "better than expected", not to mention "designed and built …
No doubt Apple haters are on overdrive and bet the next comment will be why the iPad is not as good as a NetBook. The same nerds that thought text interface was best when GUIs came out also will miss the point of the paradigm shift of the iPhone/iPad.
No doubt iPad is interesting, will I be getting one, not just yet, I already have an old PowerBook, but eventually I will get one. I expect in next few years Apple to slowly creep the iPad into bigger devices for desktop etc. use.
«The same nerds that thought text interface was best when GUIs came out»
Ha but when serious work is to be done (yes, including image fiddling), text interface is STILL best indeed, m'lud.
«the paradigm shift of the iPhone/iPad»
Paradigm shift, as in «e-mail without local storage», «no-tabs browser», «no background apps», and at the time «no cut'n paste». You're right that IS a paradigm shift. Not necessarily in the direction you seem to imply, though.
The way I see it Apple gadgetware (i-Pod -Pad -Phone) is a lot like designer furniture: that chair is very expensive and not really comfortable to sit on, but that's not what you bought it for. If you wanted a cheap comfy chair you'd go to Ikea or the like. No, you bought your designer chair because you like the look of it, and it makes you feel «different». The only difference with Apple gadgets is that _everyone_ seems to own one of those for some reason. Feels a bit like seeing 300 million hipster all wearing the same «I am different» T-shirt.
"Searching the reviews one struggles to find a single negative thought..."
Oh yeah? David Pogue's write-up (one that's been flagged by various websites as much as Mossberg's review) was from two angles - one for techies and one from consumers. Amongst his comments:
"When the very glossy 9.7-inch screen is off, every fingerprint is grossly apparent.
There’s an e-book reader app, but it’s not going to rescue the newspaper and book industries (sorry, media pundits). The selection is puny (60,000 titles for now). You can’t read well in direct sunlight. At 1.5 pounds, the iPad gets heavy in your hand after awhile (the Kindle is 10 ounces). And you can’t read books from the Apple bookstore on any other machine — not even a Mac or iPhone.
When the iPad is upright, typing on the on-screen keyboard is a horrible experience; when the iPad is turned 90 degrees, the keyboard is just barely usable (because it’s bigger). A $70 keyboard dock will be available in April, but then you’re carting around two pieces.....
There’s no multitasking, either. It’s one app at a time, just like on the iPhone. Plus no U.S.B. jacks and no camera. Bye-bye, Skype video chats. You know Apple is just leaving stuff out for next year’s model.
The bottom line is that you can get a laptop for much less money — with a full keyboard, DVD drive, U.S.B. jacks, camera-card slot, camera, the works. Besides: If you’ve already got a laptop and a smartphone, who’s going to carry around a third machine?"
There's a button at the top of the browser that goes to a tiled view that shows multiple simultaneous browsing sessions. You tap on one and that page becomes full screen. On that page you can also tap to create a new session, and if you tap hold links in any ongoing session you can chose to open it in a new page (ie, session). Though irritatingly it then switches to that one, leaving the current one (until you tap the button on the bar, then the view you want to go back to).
So then, the sense in which the browser doesn't have tabs is that it doesn't use a tab strip to display the multiple simultaneous pages a user is browsing.
Why anonymous? Because the iPad SDK is still under NDA.
Tabs, perhaps, but you can have multiple pages open at one time, there's a little square icon in the Safari toolbar (it's on the top in the iPad version, third from the left, the bottom on the iPhone) that takes care of all that, allowing to you to open new pages and giving you thumbnails of the ones you have open. So more a case of a reviewer who can't be arsed to RTFM or even press a few buttons to see what they do.
Surely this was in one of the videos that Apple chucked out the other day. I hope.
I had to stop reading at this paragraph:
"When we began developing the Boing Boing iPad presentation, we used a simulator and tapped into a lot of jQuery, thinking that snazzy transitional animations would delight. They didn't: it worked great on the Mac simulator, but were sluggish on iPad, so we aborted and went simple. When you're redesigning a site for iPad, you start to think in terms of a visually rich 'zine, not a website."
This appears to be saying that the browser is horribly slow at processing JavaScript, but that some how that's a good thing, and, in fact, thinking that fast JavaScript is good makes you an idiot. They could quite literally sell a polished turd.
"This appears to be saying that the browser is horribly slow at processing JavaScript"
.. that the boing boing devs forgot to take account of the difference between local (and possibly virtual) connections and real actual physical ones, because it would be rather surprising if the simulator actually ran faster than the hardware, particularly given that the simulator is emulating an ARM cpu on an intel chip.
Not impossible, mind you, you could cheat and have your ROM apps execute as x86 processes I suppose, just surprising.
...all those apps and ebooks etc that people will be buying now, which they can only use on an Apple machine that is also an iPad, will be crying into their babyfood when they no longer have a working iPad in a few years' time. Oh for standards and portability eh? One of many reasons I won't buy into Apple's proprietary world. Still, when your iPad breaks it'll make a great teatray.
Well if somebody gave me an iPhone I would keep for myself. If somebody gave me an iPad I would give it to one of my daughters. Difficult to see an iPad fitting in with my life. I prefer to sit in my study and use a desk computer rather than a laptop in front of the TV like my kids do.
I have a laptop for visiting customers and might one day get a netbook. Would get a netbook if I was commuting/traveling a lot, but an iPad just does not cut it for me. No physical keyboard, No camera for skype. As a iPhone type device it does not have GPS which cuts out a lot of apps I would be interested in.
From what I gather the 3G model does have GPS. The WiFi only model does not.
I think it would be a very neat little present for my mom, so she can do the email and facebook thing easily. Great battery life too. I'm not too concerned about the multitasking bit, but lack of Flash support is a big hit. Though I'm not a big fan of Flash, it is necessary for stuff like Farmville, some website navigation, and much of the video content out there.
I'd get one for my mom, but I think I'll wait for the second wave - Attack of the Android Tablets.
"as our early review model seems to have been lost in the post"
hehe...
On the other hand, Stephen Colbert (comedian on American TV) had his yesterday, and reviewed it on his show last night. He demonstrated how it can be perfect for preparing "delicious salsa" (he "cut" some vegetable with it). I believe one can already watch it on their official website (colbertnation.com) today. If I wasn't such a lazy bastard I would look up the exact URL of the clip and post here, mind.
Just to prove to us that boringboring is truly, definitely NOT spoonfeeding its clever-dumb readers with corporate excreta, Doc Doctorow has now submitted his own, radical as always, "review".
If you've read any of Cory's articles in the past you know this one:
DRM, end of computing and life as we know it, lockdown, cockblock, loss of our Electronic Freedumbs! Apple won't let me tweak! THEY WON'T LET ME! EULA nightmare! I signed a contract and now i'm not allowed to insert my device wherever I want! MY DEVICE! steam! punk!
About the iPad: Great for consuming pirated media and apps!
Can't wait for the sharpies who PRE_ORDERED and then realised they were bored of casually masturbating with it to sell them all off on ebay when the next thing comes along, so I can pick one up for my ailing grandma's crapper-side table, next to the bog roll, for casual use during those moments of leisure after an enema. No more stacks of Nat Geographics and dead trees littering our grandma's toilet floor and upsetting her when she could be casually smearing her iPad screen!
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