Still nowhere close to the responsiveness of the iOS, and I’m comparing it to the first gen iPad. I still haven’t touched the 2nd iPad.
I no longer buy Apple devices. I buy backlit rectangles that run GoodReader, AirVideo, Garageband, Tabtoolkit, and Safari. And run them well, the iPad does… And I’m assuming iPad 2 will run them even better.
So I guess Chrome made it onto the iPad.
Good thing, too, cuz I just bought it again yesterday.
I’ll try anything that has WebKit on it. Heck, it’s even got Flash, AIR, and Reader built in. And cameras, 3MP front facing, and 5MP rear facing. And does 1080p video recording. Java? Don’t care.
I like the 7″ size. Not 100% sure if I’ll like it more than the 9″ size of the iPad, but we’ll see.
Totally willing to buy this after a demo.
One of the few really “magical” things about the iPad for me was the amazing pricing of the unlimited 3G connectivity. There were tests providing that it really was unlimited.
But then today happened. And some more stuff happened.
From Dustin Curtis:
“Unlimited data” isn’t about data, or price, or value. It’s about not having to worry — or to even think about — how much you use your phone. If I’m on a 2GB plan, even though I use less than 2GB per month on average, I’ll start thinking about rationing my usage every single time I use my phone. That fundamentally changes the experience of having the internet in my pocket.
200MB for $15/month. Fine. But go over? $15 per 200 MB. Why not just push me into the 2GB plan and prorate it? Go with 2GB for $25/month, and if you go over, it’s only $10 per GB.
This is the same reason why micropayments will not work. I shouldn’t have to worry about if checking my email is going to push me over the limit.
Tethering? Why the frick does this cost anything if this plan goes into affect? Maybe if unlimited was still in the picture it makes some sense…
It’s not just AT&T that sucks, though. I have a problem with cell phone companies in general. But that is another post for another day.
Quite glad I got off the iPhone bandwagon a while ago. And I am also iPad-free. I’m almost certain nothing Apple does will make me want to get the iPhone “4G”.
If they do something with the iPod Touch? I’ll be in touch. More on this, also, at another time.
However, power-users will quickly bump into a kink in their workflow. The lack of tabs. If you’re anything like me, when you visit a news site you skim the front page and open any interesting article in a new tab.
Thankfully, someone wrote something on this, enough to get my blood boiling long enough to write this post.
I bought the iPad, not for the “Apps”, but for the 10 hour browsing experience. I was much more interested in how touch would change webapps.
I dislike Safari on the Mac, but oh man I hate it largely because of how much potential it has, and I hate waiting for the improvements to occur. The iPad browsing experience is better than a desktop experience in some ways, but in most ways it’s still not.
The post above sums up a couple of issues I have, one being the lack of a quick way to get at the tabs. I hate the Expose tabs button’s location and existence.
At first glance this appears to be a fair compromise, but as time goes on, it has proven to be a grinding experience. Having to touch a button to view your open windows is the equivalent of having to right click on a computer, pull up a contextual menu, and then selecting the window that you would like to switch to.
Sure, it looks nice, flush with all the other buttons, but it not entirely useful.
Silent removal of tabs: This exists on both the iPhone and the iPad, but I hadn’t run into it until I used the iPad. I never used Safari on the iPhone long enough to open up more than a few tabs within one session. But on the iPad? I live in Safari from time to time, grazing the Internetz. How amazingly annoying it was to find this out by experience…
No history? I can’t undo closing tabs. (Shakes iPad. Nope, that would be too magical.)
Open pages in the background: “Middle Click” equivalent gesture would be awesome.
Gesture for Expose view of all pages opened: A nice three or four finger fan out would be nice.
A Home Screen’d app should not add to the tab count.
This infuriates me to this day: I have Gmail as one of the Dock icons, and to go to my browser, I instinctively hit the Home button, then hit Safari, just to realize I was in Safari already. Oh, and that it just ate up one of my nine tabs.
Really, Home Screen’d apps should behave like a separate app, much like how Fluid does it. When I quit it, actually quit it like a normal app.
Scroll To Bottom: Yes, webpages get long. And two fingering it doesn’t really work for me. (Flicking alternate index fingers. It’s fast, but not pretty.)
Find. Freaking FIND.
I’m hoping for Opera Mini to come to the iPad soon (it wasn’t pretty on the iPhone… but maybe on the iPad?), but I would be much more interested if Chrome came to the iPad ever. Fennec would be nice, too.
While writing this post, iPad Safari has crashed for the first time. The page is greyed out and completely unresponsive to any touch on the page. I had to shut it down. For the first time.
I think I angered some human deity somewhere.
Yeah, it’s that unfortunate day today, and I hate it. But I like to make the best of it.
But here’s something that I thought after seeing this: think if each Chess piece linked up to the iPad. Not sure how… can you add Bluetooth to each piece? (That would be a battery nightmare…) Or maybe a RFID 30 pin connector and put RFID tags on each piece? (Not sure how sensitive the iPad screen is, but… oh wait, there are more than 10 pieces per side… I was thinking of putting some unique markings on the bottom of each piece but I’m pretty sure it can only detect up to 10, and even then the screen is capacitive so plastic/felt won’t work…)
Think of the cool interfaces that could be added onto the board, like being able to play with someone far away (I’m talking more along the lines of… mail chess? what was that thing called? “Correspondence chess” it seems.), but more importantly helping the player play better. Or something.
I also saw another image recently of a group of people playing scrabble on their iPhones whilst using the iPad as the main board to place letters. That’s kinda neat.
Lots of interesting possible things, now that a touch screen device doesn’t have to cost a table Surface.
Microsoft Surface was a neat concept, but it wasn’t very good. Nowhere near $500 good.
I hope this post doesn’t start off a list of iPad related posts I’ve been holding back for so long…