Chewy Apps

I’m one of the few Canadians to actually have an iPad in my house. The iPad started selling in the United States a week and a half ago, but is not available here yet. Luckily my boss ordered one for our company, and today I got to try it out.

First impression? It is heavy. I’ve seen some bloggers complain that it’s heavy, and other bloggers complain about the complaining. Maybe it’s because of my atrophying arm muscles, but I think this thing is meant to be held on your lap. It’s not something you can easily wave around.

Second impression: it’s a well made device. The glass is nice, and the aluminum back is nice. The software works as you expect it to. I tried the ABC Player app, but of course Canadians can’t see the content. I’ve tried several news apps – AP, Bloomberg, USA Today, WSJ, BBC News, and NPR. Some were better than others, but on the whole I enjoyed them. Twitterrific was nice, and made good use of popups. The Marvel Comics app doesn’t even include a free comic, which I would have expected. How am I supposed to know reading comics is a good experience or not? I tried an RSS Reader app to read my Google Reader RSS feeds, and had to say I was disappointed in the app and deleted it.

Which brings me to my next point.

The iPad still doesn’t have the exalted trinity of apps I use on my iPhone: Tweetie, Reeder, and Read It Later. (The only reason I use Tweetie instead of Twitterific is because it has Read It Later support. Otherwise I’d be using Twitterific.) So because the iPad doesn’t have these three apps that I so rely on, I still need to pull out my iPhone to get my serious usage accomplished. I hope that iPad versions of my favourite apps come out for my iPad soon.

Oh and one last thing: I really like landscape mode a lot better, and usually have the iPad locked in landscape mode.

I like the iPad, but can’t see myself using it a lot until I get my favourite apps.

UPDATE: You can’t open multiple tabs in Safari on the iPad and have everything stay in memory. Just like on the iPhone, it loads the page up when you switch tabs. This was disappointing – the iPad really needs more than 256MB of RAM.