Initial thoughts on the iPad.

We weren’t exactly surprised with Apple’s revealing of the iPad today. Aside from our dislike of “iPad,” the device does look pretty good, though it’s clearly not as revolutionary as many people hoped. While usage reports are sure to trickle in soon, we’ll take this time to look back at the post we made last week on what we thought the iPad should have, likely wouldn’t, and what would be nice for Apple to include.

Our must-haves.

Readable screen size: Check. As expected, the iPad sports a 9.7″ screen, just under the 10″ rumoured size. When we first saw the iPad in Steve Jobs’ hands, we actually thought it looked bigger. From the virtual keyboard size alone, we think the screen size is adequate, though admit that the virtual keyboard takes up an awful lot of room in landscape mode.

User-defined multitasking: Sadly, no mention of this was made. This is perhaps our biggest let-down with the iPad reveal, because jumping back and forth between apps and the springboard is cumbersome at best. Fortunately, with Backgrounder already existing on the iPhone and iPod Touch, once a proper exploit is found on the iPad, we can assuredly rely on the dev-team or other hacking group to come up with a homebrew solution. Still, a pity Apple didn’t announce additional multitasking for the iPad out-of-box.

Update: A key point some people have made is that while multitasking wasn’t featured in Apple’s presentation today, there’s no reason that Apple couldn’t reveal multitasking in the 4.0 OS announcement in a couple months. Remember that the presentation today was all about the iPad itself, not intricacies of the OS.

Decent text-input: We were bummed with the idea of having to rely purely on the virtual keyboard for text input, because though the size of the keyboard in landscape mode looks adequate, it takes up too much of the screen. Losing almost 50% of one’s screen-realestate in a 9.7″ display is losing a lot. When we saw images of the virtual keyboard in vertical mode, however, with the new iPad Pages app up, it looked like there was still plenty of screen left to preview written content. Unfortunately, it’s not clear if the keyboard in this mode is large enough for quick typing.

Of course, with the announcement of an iPad dock/keyboard accessory, our desire for the iPad grew considerably. We’d still be happier with iPad integration with a bluetooth keyboard, but until the jailbreak community gets BTStack or similar running on the iPad, we can certainly live with an Apple accessory, even if it will only work with the iPad.

Update: The word from the blogosphere is that any bluetooth keyboard can be used with the iPad, so one doesn’t need to buy an iPad-specific keyboard. We wonder if this means that iPhones will support bluetooth keyboards also. Better yet, from the pictures we’ve seen with the dock keyboard attached, the virtual keyboard does indeed disappear. Assuming the same is true for linked bluetooth keyboards, the iPad will truly be a bloggers wet-dream, multitasking aside.

Our need-nots.

Cellular data connection: The iPad will be released in wifi-only versions (in 60 days) and in wifi/3G versions (in 90 days). Proof that Apple doesn’t consider 3G a necessity for the iPad, but more of a luxury. Of the units that will sport 3G, the iPads will be unlocked, with an initial data offering via pre-pad AT&T. We have no qualms with this other than the lack of tethering support with an iPhone. With a 250MB plan for $15/month or unlimited for $30/month, we’d expect a discount for existing AT&T subscribers, or at least a discount if we’re tethering with an iPhone. Alas, tethering doesn’t even seem to be an option yet, but perhaps more will come to light in upcoming weeks as AT&T makes their own iPad/tethering announcement.

Also, for those of you who thought Verizon would come in to save the day: we told you so.

GPS: We didn’t think it would happen, and Apple only mentioned the existence of a compass. No real surprise here, since the iPad is too big to use as a standard GPS device.

Ports: We’re looking at an iPod connector here, to tether the iPad to one’s Mac computer. Not really unexpected.

Our nice-to-haves.

No desktop tethering: The iPod connector means that the iPad is still designed to hook into a full version of iTunes to serve up non-iTunes media, which is a disappointment. On the other hand, with the keyboard dock, the iPad can easily become a stand-alone computer for many people, including grandma and grandpa, who probably don’t care about importing their home media library anyway. The downside for many is that the largest storage offered for the iPad is 64GB, and with no external storage options, this means that for power-users, desktop tethering is still mandatory. Overall, it’s rather surprising that more storage wasn’t offered in an even more expensive model, but 64GB is more than enough for general travel.

Front-facing camera: The iPad has no camera at all, which is pretty much what we expected. Lack of a front-facing camera, though, will be a disappointment to many. One of the nice things about the MacBook line is the integrated iSight camera, which is a huge boon for professionals to still be able to see their kids while on the road. We entirely expect to see an integrated iSight in a future iPad model, but maybe Apple just wants to role out big features at a time, especially since they still want to position the MacBook line as a mobile product for professionals.

Greater cloud connectivity: No mention of the iPad’s use of the cloud was made, though we naturally expect the device to leverage Mobile Me in the same way the iPhone does, and definitely expect iPad versions of existing Mobile Me apps to be released around the time the iPad ships.

Conclusion:

With the exception of more multitasking, our expectations were pretty much dead-on for what Apple thought was important and what wasn’t. We’re surprised at just how accurate some of the purported “leaks” were in the past several weeks, and how bad some of the hype got. Overall, we think the iPad is a decent version-one product, with definite room for growth. We’re disappointed at the lack of data tethering with an iPhone, and would prefer to see bluetooth keyboard connectivity, and even an iSight, but none of these are excuses not to get an iPad. As a device for writing on-the-go, the iPad seems to fit the bill pretty well, and is a traveler’s dream, coming in at half the weight of the MacBook Air. While the iPad won’t replace a full-on Mac just yet, Apple did well in positioning the iPad between its Mac and iPhone/iPod Touch products, adding yet another Apple gadget to our lives.

For us, the iPad probably will replace our MacBook, though only if we pick up, say, a Mac Mini also as a sort of server for handling some of our larger media files. The big question for us now is whether we want to wait for a 3G iPad, or if we’d be plenty happy with a wifi-only version.

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