The iBook reading experience is extremely pleasant, with iPad’s bright, colorful screen making even plain text look fabulous. Though not as crisp as the Kindle's monochrome eInk display, the color LCD more than compensates. Pages turn convincingly, following your finger precisely and even showing a bit of type bleed from the opposing page as it turns. Navigation is simple, using an always present bar across the bottom of the page. You can create your own bookmarks by selecting passages and tapping an icon at the top of the page. This is as close as one can get to the experience of reading a hardback book available on any electronic device. It is thoroughly immersive, easy on the eyes, and comfortable to hold for hours.

What’s missing in the app department compared to the iPhone 3GS? Clock, Calculator, Weather, Compass, Voice Memos, and Stocks. These apps are all better suited to display on a small screen — 1024x768 would be too much. It makes sense to speculate these will all become Dashboard-like widgets in a future iPad OS update. Since all core iPad apps use the entire screen, some kind of smaller window design for applets like these seems likely.

Specs, SOCs, and silicon sandwiches
One only has to spend a few minutes ogling the iFixIt iPad Teardown to see that this is a silicon sandwich: a lean circuit board encased by a huge flat battery on one side and a huge flat display on the other. The logic board is built around a new Apple A4 processor running at 1GHz, 400 MHz faster than the similar chip at the heart of the iPhone 3GS. There is 256MB of RAM (just like the iPhone 3GS) and your choice of 16, 32, or 64MB of flash memory for storage — think of it as a silicon hard drive. The degree of integration on this logic board is astonishing even to non-geeks. One would think a board with so few chips would power a CD player, not a computer, but its apparent simplicity is deceptive. That A4 is not merely a state-of-the-art mobile microprocessor but a system on a chip (SOC) with a powerful graphics coprocessor on the same silicon wafer. There is also solid evidence for one or more additional logic modules sleeping within the A4, since the 45-nanometer die has room for roughly a third more transistors than required for the CPU and GPU modules we know about. Speculation about a hidden third processor abound, but since only Apple knows the code to release such a beastie only time will tell.

Tips and tricks
1: Want to reset your iPad? Hold down the Sleep/Wake button and the Home button for several seconds until the Slide to Power Off slider appears.

2: Need to force quit a rogue app? Do the same sequence as the reset, the press and hold the Home button until the foreground app quits.

3: To quickly mute the device, press the down volume button for two seconds.

4: Select text quickly by double-tapping to select a word and quadruple-tapping to select whole paragraphs.

5: The iPad’s Dock ships with four app icons installed, but you can add any two additional icons by pressing and holding an icon until it wiggles, then dragging it to the dock. When you’re done, stop the gyrations by pressing the Home button.

6: To quickly scroll to the top of a long web page, don’t bother rowing all the way back up there with your finger, just tap Safari’s title bar text.

7: Screen shots can be captured by clicking the Sleep/Wake and Home buttons simultaneously, the result of which are saved to your photo library and synced back to your main computer.

8: Like the iPhone virtual keyboard, the iPad’s keyboard has numerous shortcuts to less common keys that are accessed by simply pressing and holding a key, revealing a pop-up list. Open the keyboard in any app, then press and hold on each key for a moment and see what pops up. The one I use most often is the apostrophe: press and hold the comma key and up pops the handy apostrophe.

Things that could be better
There have been some reports of WiFi range issues but in my testing on both Apple and non-Apple wireless hubs I experiencded range and speeds comparable to my MacBook Pro. I suspect this may be related to a known software issue with IP addresses that has caused iPads to be temporarily restricted from use on campus wireless networks at Cornell, George Washington, Princeton, and many others. At press time Apple had not commented on the issue, which is caused by an iPad neglecting to release its temporary IP address after the DHCP server expires the address. I predict Apple will push out a minor software update to all iPads shortly. The iPad’s dual WiFi antennae are located behind the large Apple logo on the back and under the front display bezel to the left of the Home button, so there is plenty of coverage on both sides of the tablet; it does not seem likely this is a hardware issue.

There is clear evidence of some functionality being left out to make the hardware launch deadline. Several ordinary, everyday apps are inexplicably missing in action. No PDF viewer? No text editor except for the cute but rather lame Notes? And no iDisk support and no ability to mount the iPad as a virtual disk on the desktop...really?

There is also reason to assume Apple left some accessories out of the retail box to drive add-on sales. Even though there is plenty of room for it in the retail box, there is no extension cord for the AC power adapter — but you get one with the optional iPad 10w USB Power Adapter ($29). And no earbuds? They ship with $59 iPod shuffles, so how much can they cost to make in mass quantities? A buck? A buck and a quarter? The lack of an iPad Dock in the box I can forgive since Apple probably believes a sizable percentage of buyers will opt for the iPad Keyboard Dock instead. (The iPad Dock, incidentally, will not accept an iPhone or iPod touch because they are thicker at the edges than iPads.) I can also understand the lack of an included carrying case since Apple does not want to stifle the huge third-party case market, but how about throwing in a simple microfiber slipcase, or even a cleaning cloth? Would including those obvious little amenities break the bank, Apple?

Annoyingly, caps lock is disabled by default but can be enabled in Keyboard settings to work just as it does on the iPhone, with a double-tap. Alternatively, you can hold either shift key down as you type to get an all-caps string.

The iPad appears to lack a built-in help system. If you aren't connected to the net, no help for you!

Start an attachment download then switch to another app and you will discover the download has aborted upon returning to Mail. However, starting a purchase download using the App Store works fine in the background if you switch to another app at any point in the download — weird.

Sober up
There is one good thing about being a little late to the party: you will always be more sober than everyone else. I have the advantage of having read every major iPad review written in the week since the April 3 release. Several common themes arise, all of them stemming from a fundamental misunderstanding of what the iPad actually is and where it fits into the grand parade of personal computing.

For example, many have decried the lack of USB ports, a camera, and an SD Card slot — all features better suited to conventional computers. As a true tabula rasa, the iPad needs to be more future-proof than that. All of these features are subject to rapid revision and obsolescence — this year’s must-have feature is next year’s useless port. Apple’s standard 30-pin connector interface provides access to anything in the iPad through the use of small, inexpensive adapters. As Version 1.0 of a game-changing computing platform, I feel it befits the machine to have no control or physical feature that is likely to be readily outmoded. Another advantage to this approach is the reduced number of entry points for contaminants like water and dust. And of course, there is the aesthetic purity of a seamless aluminum/glass object that isn’t riddled with a dozen ugly holes and festooned with icons. In ten years, you’ll pull out your old 2010 iPad and it will neither look, nor will it be, substantially dated. Have a look at a common laptop from 1999 to experience the opposite effect. If the price of such aesthetic longevity is the cost of a couple of $29 adapters, I’m okay with that.

Summer blockbuster: iPhone OS 4
But it’s not all bad news. Days after the iPad launch, Apple announced the specs of iPhone OS 4, due this Summer. This is a major update that will install on iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPad, and third-generation iPod touch devices. There is almost certainly going to be a new iPhone released at the same time, generally predicted to be named iPhone HD. [UPDATE: On June 7, Apple announced the iPhone 4 and changed the name of the operating system used on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch to iOS 4.]

Of particular interest to iPad owners is the new multitasking feature which will allow us to have select apps running in the background, such as chat, IP voice apps, and popular streaming music apps such as Pandora. There will also be a major upgrade to the Mail app including the much-requested universal inbox showing all your incoming messages at a glance. To help manage the overwhelming tide of apps, iPhone OS 4 will introduce app folders to keep things tidy.

A clean break
Perhaps it is not surprising that the iPad feels relatively polished and complete compared to other first iterations of new classes of computers: the iPad is not so much a large iPod touch as the iPod touch is a small iPad, a proof of concept. Thus, much of the groundwork has already been done on a scale model of sorts. [UPDATE: This prediction was confirmed by Steve Jobs on June 1, stating that the iPad concept preceeded the iPhone.]

From a developers viewpoint, this is a rare opportunity to help reinvent the software experience. The iPad platform eliminates most of the annoying and dangerous problems in personal computer software. For example, there is no file system to deal with. Gone are the days when you have to spend hours on the phone guiding people through volumes and folders. Users don’t even have to remember to save their work — ever. And since each app is “sandboxed” and cannot interact with other apps or the operating system, security breaches are history. How many times have you had to teach someone how to quit background apps they are using to free up resources? The iPad takes care of that too. And the simplicity of the platform along with its built-in distribution system brings software costs down to a fraction of what they have been. Bye-bye boxed software!

This is a clean break with the personal computer as we have known it for over three decades. On an iPad, the hardware disappears and the software becomes the computer. Whatever app you start is the interface, the whole experience. To compare an iPad to any conventional portable computer makes little sense. As ever more interesting and innovative apps come into being for iPad that just could not exist for any other computer, this will become increasingly obvious to everyone.

~ David MacNeill (personalmediareview@gmail.com)