Apple iPad (16GB/32GB/64GB) - With Full Interface Videos

By Jeremy Horwitz
Editor-in-Chief, iLounge 
Published: Monday, April 5, 2010 
Category: iPads
Pros: An impressively built tablet computer, featuring a clean
industrial design borrowed from Apple’s MacBook Pro computers,
internal components derived largely from its iPod touch and iPhone
pocket devices, and stable, multi-touch software. Runs over 150,000
applications, thousands of which have been optimized for this device,
offering iPod-equivalent sonic performance, better than iPod- and
iPhone-quality visual performance, and 10+ hour battery life
unmatched by any current-generation Apple product, or most
competitors. Superb for book and periodical reading, strong for web
and video viewing, more capable of content creation than iPods and
iPhones. Supports 720p HD video playback.
Cons: Cannot serve as a standalone computer; in addition to iTunes
dependence, horsepower is presently shortchanged by limited, iPhone-
class multitasking that forces all third-party applications to occupy and
waste entire screen; lack of camera similarly limits value for video
communications. Screen dimensions are sub-optimal for movies,
including HD content. Confusing battery charging requirements and
slow iTunes synchronization. Initial iPad-optimized applications, as well
as Apple’s strategy for performing and selling color digital publications
on the device, need additional work. In addition to anti-glare, anti-
fingerprint screen film, most users will need new in-car, docking,
and/or speaker accessories.
Click Below to Read the Rest of This Review:  

For the entire decade starting in 2000, the “tablet computer” was
literally defined by products running Microsoft’s Windows operating
system—thick boxes that might as well have been laptops but for their
externally-mounted screens and included styluses. Bill Gates famously
predicted in 2001 that the Tablet PC “will be the most popular form of
PC sold in America” within five years, but that neither happened nor
even approached reality: Microsoft’s Tablet PCs remained extremely
nichey, went through a series of stylus, keyboard, software, and
screen tweaks, then were discontinued in 2009. Even users who had
been excited about tablets in concept were indifferent about
Microsoft’s “stuff a PC into a different sort of casing” approach.

With the iPad ($499-$829), Apple wants you to throw away every
preconception you may have of a tablet computer and embrace a new
paradigm. This isn’t a MacBook laptop crammed into a different shell,
running Mac OS software with a touchscreen rather than a mouse, but
rather an iPod touch grown up to fit a larger and more powerful set of
hardware, with a tweaked version of its stripped-down, power-sipping
iPhone OS software. One version of the iPad ($499-$699) is quite like
the iPod touch, accessing the Internet solely through Wi-Fi networks,
while the other ($629-$829) is more like the iPhone 3GS, with Internet
access both through Wi-Fi and 3G cellular towers—if you’re willing to
pay a premium for the hardware and for month-to-month 3G
service. Updated May 3, 2010: A comprehensive
supplemental review of the iPad with Wi-Fi + 3G is available here.
In either configuration, the iPad competes with Amazon’s Kindle as a
book reader, netbooks and iPods as a video player, web browser, and
e-mail device, and full-fledged computers as a personal organization
and content creation tool, albeit in each case with distinct advantages
and disadvantages. For instance, the iPad may occupy 10 times the
physical volume of an iPod touch, but it’s less than a third the volume
of a MacBook, and only 60% of the once “impossibly thin” MacBook
Air. Apple has achieved this with part reductions: there’s no hard
drive, no DVD drive, no trackpad, no spare ports, and no super-hot
video card requiring fan cooling. Instead, the inside houses a tight
collection of tiny, cool-running chips that are only modestly more
powerful than the ones in the latest iPod touch—capped at the same
maximum storage capacity of 64 Gigabytes—plus a significantly larger
battery, and a netbook-sized, multi-touch screen with five times the
pixels and nearly seven times the surface area of past iPod touch and
iPhone models. 
The choice of components highlights a fundamental difference in
Apple’s and Microsoft’s tablet approaches. Unlike Tablet PCs, which ran
Windows software that needed to be retrofitted to work with less
precise and responsive input devices, the iPad arrives 100% ready for
a new generation of touch-based applications and games, ones that
were literally designed from the ground up to eliminate the mice,
styluses, and physical keyboards of past computers in favor of direct,
finger-based input, all while using far less power and storage space
than the apps created for PCs and Macs. Better yet, you don’t have to
wait for these new programs—over 1,000 of them are already here on
day one of the iPad’s release, along with roughly 150,000 others that
were developed for the iPhone and iPod touch but work on the iPad as
well, though not perfectly. 
Therein lies the rub. iPhone and iPod touch applications were designed
to run one at a time and fill the entire display, and the iPhone OS-
based iPad still doesn’t enable most applications to share the screen.
Since few people would devote the entire display of a traditional
computer to a calculator, a phone dialer, or a stock widget capable of
showing only six stocks at once, Apple removed even some of its own
core iPhone OS applications from the iPad, and hasn’t yet explained
how they—or the iPhone’s full-screen instant messaging, Twittering, or
other less-than-completely attention-demanding apps—will be
replaced. Other developers have released early solutions that hog the
screen, until and unless Apple enables multitasking. But Apple clearly
sees the iPad as having greater potential than the iPhone. It has
already taken on the daunting task of creating stripped-down iPad
versions of its iWork suite of Mac productivity apps, including a word
processor, spreadsheet, and slideshow presentation tool, all designed
to work without mice, styluses, or physical keyboards. On the other
hand, it hasn’t included any iPad tools for obvious needs such as
interpreting handwriting or recording sketches—features that were
rightly considered critical in the company’s Newton series of devices in
the 1990s.
For now, Apple pitches the iPad as a computer that fully engrosses you in a web page,
your e-mail, or media because—apart from playing music in the background—you can’t
really do two things at once on it, and its non-finger input solutions are still in their
infancy. Since it depends upon Apple’s iTunes software to synchronize content from your
Mac or PC, and can’t print documents without a computer’s assistance, it’s not ready to
fully replace either desktop or laptop machines, at least, yet. These issues will almost
certainly be addressed in the future. However, rather than speculating as to what the iPad
might become six months or two years from now, our comprehensive review looks at the
impressive experience that Apple’s device actually delivers to consumers today, as well
as where it falls short of reasonable expectations from both hardware and software
standpoints. Only time will tell whether the iPad’s promise is realized with the sort of
software and hardware updates that will take it fundamentally beyond its iPod-like
origins and into a truly powerful computer in its own right.