Apple iPad Tablet Review

Email & Music

Email on the iPad is essentially the same as using email on the iPhone or iPod Touch. However, Apple takes advantage of the larger amount of screen real estate on the iPad to show each piece of mail in a dual frame mode, as shown in Figure 12. There is excellent support for mail services including MobileMe, Google Gmail, Microsoft Exchange, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, and AOL, along with most industry-standard IMAP and POP email systems.

Figure 12: Mail in two windows.

When using the iPad’s email program, I was able to view almost all attachments including Word and Excel documents. If you purchase Pages and/or Numbers, the iPad will automatically convert these documents. After you edit the documents, you can email it directly from the document. When you save an attached photo, it is automatically saved in an album. Apple did a nice job of integrating their Mail, Photos, and iWorks applications.When in the email program, the iPad converts URLs, email addresses and street addresses to links, so that you can just click to open the appropriate app like contacts, safari, or maps.Although the email program lacks some things like a unified inbox, the ability to create local folders, and rules for auto-sorting messages, it is quite capable. Apple is known for its excellent presentation and playing of audio and, as expected, it carries this over to the iPad. The only thing absent is the Cover Flow display of sweepable album covers and titles. We did miss that. The iPad’s iPod has a large selection of EQ settings including electronic, hip hop, jazz, pop, rock, and spoken word and many more. The iPad speaker can be quite loud so you can actually use it as a bedside audio player. The iPad plays in stereo. Obviously with the speakers so close together it is not perfect, but none of the audio is lost, so it sounds pretty good.The iPad’s supported audio codecs include HE-AAC, AAC, Protected AAC from the iTunes Store, Audible, Apple lossless, AIFF, MP3, MP3 VBR, and WAV.