Apple iPad Tablet Review

Surfing & Photos

Surfing the web is a much better experience on the iPad than it is on an iPhone or any other smart phone. The larger screen makes viewing much easier of the eyes and although the iPad supports panning and zooming just as it does on the iPhone, you don’t have to use it as much. As with other Apple devices, the iPad doesn’t play Flash videos. Apple says Flash is buggy and insecure but not having it really limits your surfing. The lack of Flash is quite noticeable on a device like this that you are bound to use for surfing more than the smaller iPhone. During our review time we wanted to watch the Masters Golf Tournament on our iPad and we disappointed to find that every website we tried used flash.

Because of the large screen on the iPad, the on-screen keyboard is more useable than the ones often found on smart phones. In portrait view, the keyboard is still quite small, but in landscape mode, it is close to the spacing of a normal keyboard. Note that we said “close.” Although touch typing is possible, it will definitely take some practice. After two weeks of using the iPad, we were still not able to master it. However, the iPads auto-correction and auto-suggestion features did help a lot.

With all the touching on such a big screen, fingerprints are an unavoidable problem on the iPad. Luckily, they are not noticeable when you the screen is on, except in sunlight. However, they are quite noticeable, as shown in Figure 10, when the screen is off. The iPad has the same oleophobic (oil-resistant) coating as the iPhone, so the fingerprints wipe off quite easily. You may, however, want to include a cleaning cloth in your budget for the iPad, since none is included with the device.

Figure 10: Fingerprints!

Although surfing on the iPad is a satisfying experience, we longed for the tabbed browsing that we have gotten used to on the computer. Touching the double-window icon in the left corner of the Safari toolbar gives you access to the nine sites you’ve most recently visited, but tabbed browsing would be easier.

The Photos app on the iPad is wonderful. Your albums appear as a pile of photos. Just pinch and expand a pile and each photo becomes a thumbnail. Touch a thumbnail and it looks gorgeous as a full-screen photo. Touch the bottom of the photo and you can see a small strip of all the photos. Or just swipe you finger across that photo to get to the next one. You can easily email the photo or use it as wallpaper. In three or four presses, you can also create a slideshow complete with music and transitions. There is a nice selection of slideshow music, and the Origami transition is excellent. Turn on a slide show like this and the iPad turns into a digital picture frame.

You can go into the Settings and change the duration of each slide and whether you want it to repeat or not. You can even start a slideshow without unlocking the iPad by pressing the Picture Frame icon at the lower right side of the unlock screen, as shown in Figure 11.

Figure 11: The unlock screen.