My Day-1 Impressions of the iPad 2

I’ve had my new iPad for about 21 hours now which is probably long enough to write about my initial impressions without going into too many specific. I’ve installed about a dozen apps so far, things that I generally use frequently like Evernote, Kindle App, Twitter, WordPress, Reeder, and SiriusXM. I’ve also installed a few others like HBOGO, SimpleNote and Nightstand. Here are some of my initial impressions:

1. It’s a little heavier than I imagined, but I’m used to holding a Kindle and the weight hasn’t been much of a factor at this point–just noticeable.
2. I like the screen but there are two things that bother me about it: (a) it gets dirty from touch pretty fast; (b) with my polarized sunglasses on the screen becomes invisible. Makes for reading outdoors with the sunglasses a little difficult.
3. The performance is impressive. I have an iPhone 3G; not even a 3GS, just a plain vanilla 3G. I can’t do multitasking or anything like that and compared to how fast things are on the iPad, my iPhone seems to crawl. I had no idea what I was missing!
4. Impressed with how well Google apps (Mail, Calendar, etc.) work in Safari, but I really wish that Chrome were available for the iPad. Safari is fine, but I love Chrome.
   
5. I love reading my Kindle books on the iPad. The display allows for a one-page per page layout so that I am essentially seeing on screen what I’d see on the same page in the book. The clarity is great, and despite my initial objections to the need for color or a back light, after 2 years of Kindle I am glad to have them. I need to tweak some power settings, however. Or read faster. The screen usually dims before I can complete a page.
6. I love that I can run SiriusXM in the background, continue to listen to my music while I do other things. I couldn’t do this on the iPhone.
7. I’ve never used Reeder before until I saw someone recommend it. Works beautifully on the iPad and makes it easy to keep up with my RSS feed.
8. I downloaded an HD movie to the iPad yesterday so that the Little Man could watch something. Gorgeous display. True HD as far as I can tell.
9. I thought the on-screen keyboard would be more awkward than it is. Nevertheless, I have synced my wireless keyboard and that works brilliantly. The only problem is that with the wireless keyboard in place, I keep wanting to use a mouse, instead of just pointing to the screen.
10. Love how Evernote works on the iPad. Much better implementation than on the iPhone. I’ve been using it to keep track of what I install, one note per application, with some tags to tie them all together. I put any special steps in the notes so that I can reproduce things in the future.
11. I downloaded Zinio so that I could buy a sample issue of New Scientist. Now I’m hooked. My print subscription is up in October and at that point I’ll get the magazine through Zinio on my iPad. It’s identical to the real thing. Pretty amazing.
12. Kind of disappointed that I can do rich text editing in WordPress (either directly or through the App) on the iPad. I wonder what the technical issue is since it works fine on Safari on a Mac or Windows machine. It can’t be AJAX since other AJAX functions work just fine.
13. Surprised that there was no native Facebook app for the iPad but I guess it’s because it works pretty much as-is in Safari. Minus the chat capability, apparently.
14. I downloaded the SimpleNote app so that I could write on my iPad and then sync my writing up with my Scrivener project. After I finished my writing this morning, I exported my project to SimpleNote (a nice built-in feature of Scrivener) so that I could try working on it on my iPad later today.
15. No issues with the battery life yet. I was delivered with a 91% charge. I fully charged it overnight. We’ll see how it does.

That’s it so far. Over the next several days and weeks, I’ll be posting about task-specific things that I do on the iPad, how it compares to doing it on the laptop, and how well they work for me. Stay-tuned.