I am writing this post on my iPad — one of two we got this morning around 9am. According to the delivery guy each of six drivers in Tuscaloosa had about fifteen. If that’s a good sample — which it almost certainly isn’t — then about 0.1% of the US population took delivery of an iPad this morning.

I am touch typing (two fingered) on the glass keyboard. It’s just fine — but I did hit one snag. Safari didn’t recognize the standard word press editor as a text entry field, so I’m having to enter HTML directly.

More impressions later.

Battery Life

Aside: typing HTML with the iPad’s glass keyboard is an exercise in frustration — you need to switch between three keyboards four times to enter a single open heading. (Further aside: I am now going back through my iPad postings and fixing the paragraphs.)

I’ve been using my iPad solidly since it arrived, so around 3.5h, a lot of it in fairly demanding apps, and the battery is at 60% — having started at around 90% and refusing to charge when docked.

Edit: after being used much of the day and getting about 15 minutes of charger time (the iPad can only be charged via syncing to a “high power” USB slot, which seems not to include any USB slot I’ve tried) the iPad eventually got down to 30%. This morning I read for about 30 minutes using 3%.

Apps

I immediately bought Pages and Keynote. I’ll probably buy Numbers eventually, but I can think of no use for it right now. (I’d get Bento if it had export options to something other than the desktop bento for which I have zero use.)

Both are what you expect although perhaps missing a cherished feature or two. What I’m really missing on the iPad right now is some kind of file system — as I’ll discuss below.

I also got Alias Autodesk Sketchbook Pro which is based on a program originally written for tablet PCs. Brushes on the iPhone was painful to use — I never produced a single picture with it of which I was especially proud. My first two attempts with Sketchbook were decent, and I tried to upload one to this blog entry — so far no dice. (I’ve since bought a $0.99 app called Art Studio which is technically inferior to Autodesk’s product, but better thought out UI-wise.)

Similarly I can’t download PDFs — although they do render beautifully in Safari.

Of the built in apps — I’ll include iBooks in this category — Mail is a joy (although I understand gmail on the iPad is wonderful too), iBooks is great, although many of the Gutenberg titles are a mess until you get past the cruft at the beginning, and the others are ok.

The photos app and origami slideshow option are simply breathtaking. This is pretty much the best way to look at photographs.

On the down side, I find calendar’s inability to create events when I tap in a particular date/time to be infuriating. Lots of room for tweaking.

There are several Dr Seuss books in the app store — I bought two, and the only down side is they seem to chew through batteries super fast… Flash? Or just poorly coded?

Ergonomics

I’ve already discussed the keyboard quite a bit. The only real issue with the glass keyboard — in either orientation — for me is the business of getting to special characters. If I were typing a novel, say, it wouldn’t be a big deal (especially with the smart correction handling most apostrophes, etc), but typing email addresses and HTML tags is a serious nuisance.
(Once you have one heading or whatever typed, copy and paste mostly solves the problem. Also, last night I discovered that ?123-Z is the Undo key (“?123” is a very cumbersome name for a modifier key, and somewhat misleading when the “?” is available via “shift-.”)

As a book reader, and I haven’t tried reading anything serious yet, it weighs less than a hardcover novel and can be held at angles a book cannot owing to not having pages to worry about. E.g. I find reading lying down with the iPad propped on my chest very comfortable, but could never read a book like this because I’d have to hold the pages still.

Just as I was getting used to drawing with my fingers, I encountered an Apple store employee using a capacitative stylus which seemed to work pretty well. Maybe I’ll try one for drawing.