Ok, boys and girls your fearless leader took a few minutes out of her WonderCon day and purchased a 64 Gig iPad. I went to the store at about 12:30 pm and didn’t think the store would have anymore, it turns out they had plenty, but I had to wait in line and it would take up to 2 hours. I decided to blow off my 2pm Toy Story 3 interview and experience what it’s like to wait for the hot device of the moment. The woman in front of me was purchasing an iPad as a gift and the Apple “Genius” was trying to convince her to get the 16 Gig version I told her not to waste her time and the Genius gave me a dirty look. The line moved surprisingly fast, we got to the door in about an 1/2 hour and was greeted by our own personal shopper who escorted us into the store – very cool.
I bought the Apple Case to go with the iPad and the my shopper guy handed me this big Apple Store bag and I told him there’s no way I’m walking around San Francisco and the WonderCon convention floor for the next 6 hours with a bag that says “Hey, I have an iPad mug me!” I wanted to buy it yesterday because I have a midnight flight Sunday, so I’m going to be spending a lot of quality time in my hotel lobby and at the Airport. I will have a full review Monday afternoon, in the meantime my gut reaction is I don’t like it.
- As I thought, this being a WiFi only device means it’s gimped. I’m in a Hotel that only has WiFi in the lobby. I got back from to my Hotel Room at around 8ish and all I wanted to do was open my iPad and start playing with it – after a nice long soak in the Jacuzzi. Problem was, I needed to be connected to the Internet before I could really do anything – set up my Kindle Reader, read the USA Today iPad App, Browse iBooks, Comixology, Marvel, etc. So I had to go downstairs and sit in the lobby for 2 hrs to get all my books.
- The lack of Multitasking was irritating as heck. While downloading stuff, in the above mentioned apps, the only thing I could do is sit there and stare at the freaking downloading bar.
- The iTunes store is now a complete mess, trying to figure out what’s an iPad or iPhone Apps is annoying.
- Ridiculous Price Gouging! In the iBooks Store they had a book called George Lucas BLockbusting that was $21! $21 for a GD Ebook? All the other apps that I already own are now triple the price for the Ipad – apps that were $.99 are now $6. I appreciate that there’s a little more work involved in getting apps to work on iPads but charging triple and quadruple the price?
- I have about 60 Apps for my iPhone. Unless an App says HD or iPad in the title it is impossible to distinguish between an iPhone and iPad App and you want to use only iPad compatible Apps for this device because viewing upscaled versions of iPhone apps is not good. I did notice that the iPad Apps do not show up on iPhone Syncs.
- Numerous Syncing issues. Syncing my 50 Gig Library took 4 hours because it had trouble synching certain files so kept crapping out. These are movies and audio files I bought from iTunes. I had to remove them from my library before the iPad would sync properly. It isn’t like iTunes let’s you re-download items I already purchased, it’s why I HATE buying anything from the iTunes store. To make matters worse it crashed my Macbook each time so I had to reboot 4 times.
- I bought this specifically so that I can use it as a Kindle Reader, turns out it’s pretty difficult to hold and use for any period of time. I tried to read it in bed and it was just really difficult. By Comparison my Kindle 2 is light and almost the perfect size for bedtime reading and I find that I like using a button while lying down.
- It’s heavy and the Apple Case sucks.
I’m fairly certain I’m returning this in the next week or so and going to take the $80 (10% of $800) Apple Tax for the privilege of being able to return something. We’re launching a new iPad website so I have to have this thing, but I’m going to wait for the 3G model – yeah AT&T sucks, but what else can I do?