The iPad isn’t finished yet. With sixty days still to go before the Wi-Fi version appears in stores worldwide, Apple still has time to add new features and tweak existing ones. The iPads that were on display in Apple’s post-event demo room were just prototypes, with some features not quite working, such as the ability to change the screen’s wallpaper, something I was warned not to try, or missing entirely, such as the cellular 3G internet access or the full range of font size options for reading books (there were just two – big and small). Next to each iPad stood an Apple employee in a friendly blue shirt and whenever I asked one a question, about text-to-speech or photo-editing features, the answer was always “we’re still working on it”.

 

During the unveiling Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs advised that it’s not enough to simply see the iPad, you have to get your hands on it, that once you do you’ll feel a great difference and understand why it’s revolutionary. I must confess that having held it in my hands I felt nothing revolutionary. The iPad is like a giant iPod Touch, and that’s impressive, but far from magical. The iPad is flat-thin, like a clipboard, in that you’re meant to hold it with two hands and support it from below. Most portable devices have a bit of body to them so they can fall into the palm of your hand and give you something to grasp, but the iPad is like a picture frame or a serving tray in that you hold it with two hands before you. The backside has a slight curve, a swell, to help your fingers find purchase, but it means that it doesn’t rest completely flat when placed on a table.

The immediate experience is that of using an iPod Touch or iPhone. You have a home button at the bottom and a screen full of app icons that you can swipe to access more and more screens of app icons. The accelerometer, the sensor that allows the screen to automatically rotate between portrait and landscape views is more sensitive on the iPad than on the iPhone. Once you pick it up, the screen rotates wildly, loosely, until you hold it firmly and then it settles down. The idea is to make it easy for you to flip the iPad over in your hands and point the screen outwards for others to see. The screen rotates so quickly to appear right side up for the viewer that the transition is seemless.

The LCD screen is gorgeous. At 9.7” it really pops, thanks in part to a backlit LED system, but also perhaps because Apple is using IPS (In-Plane Switching), which better arranges the liquid crystals that make up the image. Photographs have an amazing clarity to them and fullscreen Google Maps deliver a powerfully addictive experience that comes the closest to delivering the “intimate” experience Apple referrs to. Playing with Google Maps on the iPad feels the same as playing with maps spread out across a large table.

There are, however, two slight drawbacks to the screen. Although videos playback with as much clarity as photographs, the screen itself isn’t the standard widescreen format and most movies will have large black bars on both top and bottom. Fortunately the black is a deep black, not a grey or charcoal, which the eye picks up and that can effect picture quality, adjusting how you see the blacks within the movie itself.

 

The second is the quality of existing apps designed for the smaller iPhone screen. All existing iPhone Apps can run on the iPad, but in either a windowed “pixel by pixel” mode (1x) where the app appears just as small as on the iPhone or double the size (2x) to enlarge the app so that it comes close to fullscreen, Many apps appear heavily pixilated or blocky in this view, Facebook in particular is quite ugly, and it takes away some of that magic that Apple is going for. It’s a temporary situation of course, once developers see how poorly their apps scale up, they’ll be quick to release new iPad versions rather quickly.

The iPad is, of course, an iPod too. It has the same 30-pin connector that it uses to dock and sync via USB to your PC or Mac computer and uses iTunes to purchase, play, and back-up all of your content, which includes everything an iPod can play. The few buttons on the iPad are for playback – volume, mute, and power. Audio comes out of a set of speakers, four little grilles along the bottom edge, and a headphone jack. Amongst the shuffling crowds of the demo room it was hard to get a real sense of sound quality, but I can tell you then when you have music playing it actually makes the back of the iPad vibrate a bit.

An included microphone lets you record sounds including your voice for dictation or thanks to the Wi-Fi and 3G internet connections, Skyping. This only serves to emphasize the iPad’s lack of a camera. It’s not that a 9.7” flat display lends itself to being used to take photographs with, but built-in cameras are increasingly being used for Augmented Reality, bar-code scanning, and other innovations that seem right at home with how the iPad is intended to be used.

Having a larger screen gives Apple two advantages for designing software. The first is that apps can now spread themselves out better, giving access to settings and options menus without having to leave the main screen. The second is that Multi-Touch controls can now be used for larger tasks. The new photo album app fills the screen with little piles of large thumbnails and if you spread your fingers over these piles, they fan out to deliver a preview of what’s inside the album itself. That really is the magic that Apple is referring to with the iPad, that you now have a bigger screen to work with the finger swipes and gestures, a larger workspace to use both hands with in a sleight-of-hand that take us one step closer to those Minority Report concepts.

You can see this right away in iWork, Apple’s suite of office apps. Designing presentation slides in Keynote, or charts in Numbers, or even adjusting the wordwrap of text in Pages, now takes on a more powerful feel as you quickly swipe and manipulate content. The iPad can connect to a projector for presentations and apps can be designed to deliver control panels that won’t appear as part of the projected image. All combined the iPad has the potential to be a powerful business device, except the corporate world is very much a Windows one and for Apple to really meet the desires of that demographic they’ll have to hope for Mac Office to make an iPad appearance. Can or even will Microsoft develop a Multi-Touch version of Word or Excel?

Until I get a chance to curl up on a couch with the iPad for an afternoon read, it’s too early to say how it will fare as an eBook reader. Certainly books have been given a gorgeous presentation in the way fonts, page edges, bookmarks, and covers are displayed, and in colour everything pops off of the screen, but to read from a back-lit screen, one that is quite glossy and picks up the glare of other lights, may prove too much for some.

For the software that is developed specifically for the iPad, there’s a rich use of animation with virtual physics. Pages turn as if real, allowing you to use your finger to gradually curl the page from the corner, and books when opened from the shelf swirl and flutter its pages towards the screen. I love the way the bookshelf itself rotates to reveal a secret passageway to the iBook store. As Apple is well known for, they’ve created a compelling and attractive eBook experience.

Many are speculating that Apple’s launch of an iBook Store will be bad news for Amazon and Sony. Maybe not Sony as Apple is using the same open ePub format for their books that the Sony Reader supports. This suggests that both iPad and Sony Readers will work with both the Sony and Apple eBook Stores. Due to copyright restrictions, Apple may have to delay launching their own store in Canada at first, which means that Canadians can use the Sony eBook Store until they do.

With a larger screen the virtual keyboard has the chance to be larger and closer in size to a conventional keyboard. For those who have difficulty using it on the iPhone, this may make all the difference in the world. The keyboard appears in both portrait and landscape views and typing with it takes some adjustment, simply because the the iPad rests flat on the table and there’s none of the clackity-clack that we associate with typing. Apple is marketing an additional keyboard dock that allows you to prop up the iPad and use a small aluminum keyboard with to deliver that laptop-like typing experience, plus you can use a Bluetooth-enabled keyboard and I’m sure plenty of manufacturers will be marketing their own solutions once the iPad launches.

Although it may be too early to see how the iPad may revolutionize the computer industry, it certainly isn’t going to replace any existing product, it’s easy to see how the iPad will find its use. Office workers will be quick to use it for presentations and for taking notes in meetings. With it’s rich slideshow transitions and large touchscreen display it’s the perfect digital photo album and game system to share with friends (imagine playing Hasbro’s “Operation” on it), and an ideal companion device to curl up with on the couch for websurfing or drawing, or to take to bed with you for some reading at the end of the day.

You may not need so much as want an iPad which makes it an affordable luxury for now.