Twelve days ago I got a new iPad with WiFi and 3G and promptly took it on a one week business trip to Europe. Generally, I think it lived up to its hype and is quite elegant. I very much like the choice of apps and I’m excited about what the changes to the UI will mean to software and the industry. Coupled with the upcoming tablets based on open source, I think competition will drive some real innovation in this space.
There are two areas where I repeatedly found myself thinking that the tablet was less convenient than a laptop: multitasking and text editing for my blog.
It is well known that the iPad does not do multitasking in general, though the Apple apps can do it. This means that generally when you move from one app to another, the first saves state and shuts down. When you want to go back to that first one, it restarts and lets you reload your data. This is not fast nor convenient, and gets tiresome quickly. I don’t mind the one-app-per-screen rule, but the slow context shifting hurts productivity. Better multitasking will come later this year, though it will not be the same as we used to on modern operating systems like Linux or OS X.
The second area, text editing, is just awkward. When I create a blog entry I often include links, lists, and some special formatting. This involves selecting text, copying, opening forms, pasting, and so forth. Copying text from one app to another can be slow because of the multitasking, but the general browser-based interfaces such as the WordPress admin and editing panels have been tuned for mice and full keyboards, not fingers. Coupled with not being able to use social bookmarking sites like Diigo in an easy way means that I won’t be doing much on my iPad for my blog for some time, other than the really easy things like approving comments.
Things I do like are the interfaces for music, App Store, video, the Kindle App, maps, and some games like Scrabble. Using a browser with a screen that’s big enough to see a lot of the page is a big improvement over the iPhone. Safari on the iPad needs tabs, again for speed of switching.
