Magic | ‘Majik
Noun

The power of apparently influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces.

To say I wasn’t overly impressed when I first watched Steve Jobs debut the iPad, is an understatement. I hated it. I didn’t believe the claims, the hype– I guess I was thinking inside the box as opposed to outside of it. That’s why Steve Jobs is a billionaire and, well I’m not. To be fair, seeing the iPad in a web stream and holding one are two completely different things. Sure it looked nice and all, but I just didn’t see a real need for one. Then I held one. Magic.

A New-Phase Computing Device

The iPad is not a computer per se, but it’s not a pocket calculator either. It takes the mundane things one does on a PC– writing email, browsing the web, and offers a much simpler approach to accomplish the same tasks– only faster and with much more joy.

At the time of writing this review, on the iPad’s keyboard no less, I find myself going to grab my iPad for things I used to pick up my laptop for. If you always wanted something more than a smart phone and something less than a laptop, this is the device for you. The user interface is completely intuitive. I mean, how hard is it to point and touch with your finger? The iPad takes the innovation of the iPhone and really goes yard. The apps that are natively written to run on the iPad really take advantage of the added screen real estate and computing power.

This last last week, I’ve been on somewhat of a self-imposed hiatus from my MacBook Pro. I’ve been trying to do as much as I can with the iPad and not resort to cracking open the computer. So far, so good. Granted, I’m not going to be doing image editing or web design on the iPad– yet, but when apps hit the iPad which allow more complex tasks and content creation, I may end up doing much more on this platform. Truth be told, I did have to edit this article on my computer, as well as post it and do the image editing for the title graphic. But with a few iPad apps someday, I’d be able to do this entire article on the iPad alone.

Life Is Good

Aside from the overall experience, I am really excited about the battery life. Usually when manufacturers say five hour life, it’s two. When they say seven, it’s four. When apple said ten, they lied too– I got eleven one day. Yes, you read correctly, eleven hours. And I’m not talking about no brightness, no sound, and just writing email, I’m talking about hours of games, web browsing, book reading, music, video, and more. I literally charge it at a night, and wake up in the morning and I’m good all day. I thought my new MBP had great battery life. It’s ridiculous. Apple’s engineers have created a truly remarkable battery.

But, like any piece of hardware, it can only be as strong as the software it will run. Out of the gate, the iPad has some really great titles, with many more in the pipeline. Apps such as Apple’s own Pages, Numbers allow for productivity, and Plants vs. Zombies makes for great fun. The Apple iBooks app is great, and I already purchased a few books. Reading is fun again! I’ve totally replaced my RSS reader on my computer and now read all my news feeds exclusively on my iPad, using the NewsRack app.

If you scroll up to the top of this article, you’ll see a quickly drawn picture of an iPad. I did that using the Brushes app. Not only can you export/email your paintings, with the free companion app for your Mac, you can even create a QuickTime movie of your drawing, stroke by stroke, until completion. High-resolution exporting is also available with the desktop app.

Growing Pains

However, with any new product, and especially for the early adopters, there are bound to be issues. One such issue going round is a problem with WiFi access. People are finding that their WiFi signals are somewhat diminished, even at the same distance as another device using WiFi. I do find that the signal is stronger with one router versus another. The location that I require a signal most, my apartment, gets almost nothing. This is partly due to me “borrowing” my signal. But I do get full strength on my MBP, but just not my iPod nor my iPad. Strange. I did return my first iPad, but the second unit exhibits the same behavior, which is probably normal. At least I did get to return my first iPad, with a dead pixel.

Ten days in, I can honestly say that the iPad is a real game changer. There are going to be a load of tablets coming out during this year. A good many (if not all) will be complicated Windows machines, with just a new interface. The genius behind the iPad is that it isn’t Mac OS on a tablet, it’s a entirely new experience. It’s hardware limitations require it to do things much differently, and focus on the things one would want to do, rather than hundreds of other uses the average person would never need. Full-blown Mac OS would hog the resources and probably end up cutting the battery life in half. I suspect that these new tables coming out will have very poor battery life, compared to the 10 hours you can get with the iPad.

The age of the internet appliance is finally here, and the iPad has opened the gates. Only time will tell how this sector turns out, but if history is any telling of the future, Apple will come out head and shoulders above the competition. I officially revise my iPad review and give it 5/5 stars.

Sent from my iPad

Get ready to soil your plants in an all-new action-strategy game from PopCap! A mob of fun-loving zombies is about to invade your home, and your only defense is an arsenal of 49 zombie-zapping plants. Use peashooters, wall-nuts, cherry bombs and more to mulchify 26 types of zombies before they can reach your front door.

Each zombie has its own special skills, so you’ll need to think fast and plant faster to combat them all. But be careful how you use your limited supply of greens and seeds… as you battle the fun-dead, obstacles like a setting sun, creeping fog and a swimming pool add to the challenge. And with five game modes to dig into, the fun never dies! –Developer

Though the iPad is the greatest eBook reader, and does a bunch of other cool stuff, it seems that the genre of video games is where most of the buzz is. WiFi issues aside, I’ve been loving my iPad since minute one.

I usually shy away from games on mobile devices, but the iPad’s larger screen and faster processor allow for some great gaming experiences. PvZ takes advantage of both features.

It’s a “tower defense” style game, meaning you must use anything and everything in your weapons arsenal to stop the invading foes– who happen to be zombies in this game. Your weapons are various plants and other objects you can readily (in some cases) find in your background.

The game takes place in your backyard and you must stop the zombies from getting in your house and EATING YOUR BRAINS! Believe me, in the later stages, it’s harder than it sounds. They just keep coming and coming!

I have purchased some other, shall we say, more productive apps, but I’ll talk about those at another time. PvZ is stealing the show right now!

FYI, this game is also available for Mac + PC, as well as iPod and iPhone.

On January 27th, Apple finally announced their long anticipated “tablet device” called the iPad. While iSlate, iTablet, or even the rehashed iBook would have been good choices, iPad is fine I guess. I would like to see Apple drop the “i” prefix one of these days however.

As expected, the fit and finish of the device is amazing. In keeping with their recent designs, the iPad sports a unibody aluminum back plate and the front is all glass. I’m sure it really feels great in-hand, and I know the glass surface is going to be super-silky smooth to the touch. For the materials, I give an A+. You can’t get any better in my opinion.

Now, the way the front looks is not as impressive as the back/sides of the unit. The front has beautiful glass with the now traditional home button, but there is this really thick black bezel around the edges, just like a MacBook Pro and iMac has. On the iPad, it is kind of distracting as the screen is much smaller than the MacBook Pro or iMac. The one thing you’ll quickly notice is that the device does not sport the widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio, but rather it uses 4:3. This is surprising, since Apple has moved to a wider 16:9 ratio for their new iMacs, and probably will use the 16:9 size for the MacBook refresh coming soon.

If Apple is touting this device to be a great movie player, why 4:3? Even with 16:9 screens, you almost always will get black bars at the top/bottom of your screen because the actual movie uses a still wider aspect ratio. But with 4:3 and some of the widest movies, you’re going to see a tiny strip of movie in the center of the screen, the rest will be all black. Rather than black bars, the movie strip will be the only noticeable bar. Not what I call a better viewing experience, which leads me to my next thought.

At the Apple media event, Steve Jobs proclaimed the iPad a new category of technology. It’s not a phone, not a computer, but a new kind of computing device. He went on to say that unless you make it the best of it’s class, there is no point in even creating a product. I agree with him that it’s the best of its class, partly because there is no competition. But why does there need to be this new class?

He then went on to say, with the help of his slideshow, that this device must do some things better than a phone and better than a computer. He used the iPhone and MacBook Pro as examples. The things he said this new device must do better are Browsing, Email, Photos, Video, Music, Games, and eBooks. I’m going to take these one-by-one.

Browsing

For me, this is the bread and butter of such a device. A large 10 inch screen, touch sensitive, with the ability to quickly read news, search Wiki, or do most things you can do at home, but on the go. I think the potential for browsing on the iPad is there, but the current implementation is still lacking. On my MBP, I can view a site, download a file, save it to my desktop, and share/sync it using MobileMe quite easily. Not much effort. If the iPad offers a “Downloads” folder like MacOS and has an easy way to sync these files with your MobileMe account, I think I would feel much better about the browsing experience. It could easily be almost as good as my MBP.

However, one glaring hole still exists– the omission of Adobe Flash. Like the iPhone and iPod Touch, the iPad will not be able to properly render websites which use Flash. Now, we can get into a debate about how Flash is becoming obsolete, and how HTML5 is coming down the pike. But Flash is here now, and here to stay for the foreseeable future. By not allowing Flash to run on the iPad, you are effectively breaking millions of websites. How you can say the iPad does browsing better than a computer when you can’t even see Flash content, I don’t know.

To add insult to injury, it has been shown that Apple used deceit in it’s iPad promo video by faking the New York Times website, and showing the site with Flash working. If you watch the video, pause it at 1:15 and then screen-zoom to view the web address bar. You’ll see it’s pointing to www.apple.com. Busted! Later in the video, they show the NYT site again, this time with the correct URL. Looks like someone forgot to change the URL before they took that screencast!

This directly contradicts Steve Jobs’ demonstration, where he went to the New York Times website (I can’t imagine why) and the Flash content did not render, instead showing the missing browser plugin icon. My question, why would they try to fool people in the video? I mean, they made a conscious effort to fudge the Flash, they had to have known that Mac geeks would see that in a hurry.

At first I thought maybe it was a demo site by The New York Times, maybe made to support the iPad with no Flash content. But the video and the live demonstration show that not to be the case. So Apple basically is lying to it’s customers. Am I surprised? No. When you see a commercial, the first thing that should pop into your lead is the word lie. I heard that somewhere, don’t know who coined it.

While writing this article, Apple has quietly edited its iPad video and has removed the flash content, and now shows the plugin icon where the flash content would have been. Way to get caught with your pants down Apple.

Email

While the email app looks nice, and it appears to have many useful features, the iPad does not do email better than my MacBook Pro. The Apple Mail app on my computer does 100 things that I’m sure the iPad version won’t or can’t do. Just because I can view my mail with a flick of my finger doesn’t mean it does it better. It may do it better than the iPhone, but not my computer.

Am I to believe that I can type an email faster on the iPad than I can on my computer? What about attachments? If I get an attachment the iPad can’t read, I have to wait till I view it on my computer. That doesn’t sound like better email.

Photos

Again, just being able to use your finger to see your photos doesn’t mean it’s better than iPhoto on my Mac. Also, having the ability to turn the iPad over and have the photo re-adjust its orientation so the person in front of you can see it properly doesn’t make this a slam-dunk. If anything this is iPhoto Light. Sure, it looks cool, but it doesn’t do anything better than my Mac. And, my Mac has a camera for actually taking photos, something the iPad lacks.

Video

This one is really laughable. A 10 inch screen with a 4:3 aspect ratio is better than watching movies on a 17 inch MacBook Pro widescreen or a 27 inch iMac? The iPad does better video than a computer? Again, no video camera on the iPad, yet my MacBook Pro has one. Why would I downgrade features? I really don’t know where Steve was pulling these nuggets of wisdom from, but every time he said something I felt embarrassed for him as I know he knew it was a bunch of crap.

Music

If you are talking about playing music, you don’t really need a complicated interface. The original iPod proved that. Thus, the iPad can handle music equally as good if you just intend to listen. But if you want to start ripping, burning, or doing anything special with your music, the iPad isn’t your tool. This is probably the closest I’ll come to saying the iPad does something better, but it still doesn’t do music better than my computer.

Games

I’m not spending too much time on this one. This is totally ridiculous. A computer will always play games better. I guess it’s the type of games for which you can get into an argument about. Small, hand-held games typically play better on the iPhone than a computer. But the idea of using the accelerometers in the iPad to play games… I think people would look really silly holding this 10 inch device and moving it in all directions. You certainly would bring attention to yourself.

eBooks

Finally…. the one thing the iPad does better than my MacBook Pro or iPhone. It can read a mean book. So wait, the iPad is just a book reader with a bunch of extras? In a word– YES. This is what the iPad really is… a book reader. This is what it was really meant to do. For me, I would love to ditch paper books and start reading all digital versions. Plus, I’d like the idea of being able to read various print publications digitally as well. There is nothing like subscribing to a magazine and have it electronically sent to your device.

So for me, Apple was 1 for 7 on it’s feature list. Don’t get me wrong, browsing, email and the like are welcomed, but they don’t do anything better than my computer. So again, we are going to pay a premium (starting at $499) for a book reader that can do a bunch of other stuff. Plus, if you want internet access, you’ll pay $15/month for 250MB of bandwidth, or $30/month for unlimited bandwidth.

As a revolutionary device, I have to give this 2 1/2 out of 5 stars. It’s the best eBook reader, but I was hoping for much more from Apple.

Update 4/11/10: Ignore everything you have just read. This is probably the most breakthrough device in all my years of computing. It actually has replaced my MacBook Pro for certain uses. I can really foresee this platform, given the apps I use on my MBP are offered, being able to handle *most* of what I do with my computer. Right now, the iPad is really a content consumption device. But with better tools and more power, this will allow for creation as well. I will write a dedicated review in the days to come.