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Postby dun dun dun... chips » Sat Apr 03, 2010 2:01 pm

so, im in the apple store up in grand rapids right now, and the ipad preview is going on (it's bloody loud in here) and I must admit, from a completely unbiased opinion, this thing is sweet. There was a lot of hype about this thing, and some of it was deserved, but I must say that this has definitely given exactly what apple said it would.
The general use of it is very simple, everything is extremely obvious.
the apps flow nicely, the size of the screen doesn't bother me at all, typing is much easier than I thought it would be, considering I generally hate ins with tiny screens.
more on this later, people are waiting...

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Postby dun dun dun... chips » Sun Apr 04, 2010 12:24 am

and by later i mean tomorrow.

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Postby Darkfoxx » Sun Apr 04, 2010 12:26 am

DA PAPE!
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Postby Bacon » Sun Apr 04, 2010 12:53 am

DA PAPE RAPE!

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Postby Darkfoxx » Sun Apr 04, 2010 12:59 am

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Postby Jif » Sun Apr 04, 2010 1:55 pm

i dont like easy

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Postby dun dun dun... chips » Tue Apr 06, 2010 9:25 pm


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Postby dun dun dun... chips » Tue Apr 06, 2010 9:28 pm

finally, the review i said i would do last sunday. ive been pestered to finish it, so itll probably be missing something. any questions that arent trolling (jif) shoot my way and ill answer them.



so, my review for the iPad. ive had some time to think about this, and now im going to write what i thought about it. an fyi, this is going to be completely subjective, so any of you people out there *cough*jif*cough* that want to flame the iPad, do it somewhere else, i don't care what you have to say, and im not writing this to praise or put down apple. completely technical review.

so, the first time i saw the iPad, it was hanging in a glass case, my first thought being this: 'its a tad bit bigger than i thought it would be. hm.' its smooth, sleek, thin, and looks, well, like most apple products. nothing looks out of place.
when i first got to pick one up, i was surprised at its weight, it was slightly heavier than i thought it would be as well, but not fatiguingly heavy. you press the button to turn it on, and its there, immediately, no graphics or loading delay. the screen looks really nice, its not to small, everything fits on the screen, and the resolution isnt massive, so they cant make things to small to see comfortably at 3 feet. the screen is smooth and its very easy to drap fingers across it.
the overall gui is extremely similar to the iphone/ipod touch, except its much easier to read, looks more laid back and spread out. makes poking things easier, and it allows things to be slightly bigger, meaning i didnt have as hard a time distinguishing between apps.

the first apps i tried were the apple apps that came with the ipad, namely: safari, the ipod app, the bookshelf app, youtube, mail, photos, and a few others.

started with the ipod. it opens up an interface that is mostly a combination of the ipod touch ipod look combined with the smooth computer interface of itunes, and it looks very nice. its easy to sort music, the album artwork looks really nice, and its easy to manipulate what you are listening to without having to do very much. not to much else to say about it, as the ipod function is pretty simple: play music.

the bookshelf was next, because it was the first that caught my eye, and i must say, it looks really nice. i got to sit with the ipad for about 20 minutes or so, bullocks to everyone waiting, and the books read very easily. you can change the font and the size of the text, making reading extremely easy on the eyes. the lcd doesnt hurt after long periods of time, im especially prone to pain from displays. they also put a feature in the hardware, a screen orientation lock switch. generally, when you turn the ipad on its side, the screen rotates to landscape view, but say you want to read while lying down? this button will lock the screen so turning the ipad wont change the orientation. spiffy. (it works with anything, not just the books, but thats when i found it...)

i tried the photos next, and there were some really neat ideas implemented. the photos were sortable in multiple ways: albums, date taken, whos in the photos (which is a neat feature, 'faces' does the face recognition really accurately without having to tag anyone) and where the photo was taken. theses stacks are easy to manipulate: you want to see what photos are in a stack, you 'antipinch?' (the typical way to zoom in, whatever you want to call it) a little, and the stack will spread out, showing all the photos in the stack, depending on how far you pull your fingers apart. dont want to view the photos in the stack? pinch and they stack back up. want the stack expanded to each photo? throw your fingers apart and it will put the photos in the album in the classic photo view.

i was skeptical about the iwork suite, pages, keynote, and numbers, because i didnt see the ipad as being proficient with creating documents, and, honestly, i still am, but much less than i was before. pages is an extremely simple app, nice to look at, but still does everything you need to make a good looking document. its not going to do everything, but if you need that sort of power, just use a regular computer. they keyboard is easy to use, even though im lazy and like to keep my fingers on the keys, which causes problems on the touchscreen, but once i got used to that, i could use it just fine without hunting and pecking and such, even though im used to using dvorak. keynote is wonderful, but the real keynote was as well, so this didnt surprise me to much. its very smooth, and the ipad could really be useful for making and giving presentations. numbers was, well, a spreadsheet. woot.

next was the internet, and even though there was no flash, i ran into no problems with my everyday surfing. gmail worked fine, facebook worked fine, the forums worked fine, random links and bored wandering worked fine. the only thing flash i ran into was the clan meet ticker in the forums. safari rendered webpages beautifully, both in landscape and portrait, and the zooming wasnt twitchy, the zoom was fully dynamic. the web was ridiculously fast as well, considering there was about 25 of these, along with the computers in the apple store, all sitting on the wireless network.

mail was next, and it was brilliant. the organization of the application made browsing mail so easy. the ipads introduction of the old NeXT menubar (floating, hidable) made the manipulation ridiculously easy. however, outside of ease of use, a mail program is a mail program.

the calendar and contacts programs look lovely, but i dont use them much, so i didnt explore much.


now, onto complaints:

the screen is still small. its better than the iphone/ipod touch and all the smartphones, so i guess i shouldnt complain, but anything with a small screen will bother me.

the keyboard, but this is another thing you cant get around with a touchscreen. i let my fingers sit around on the keys, and the touchscreen thinks im punching things im not occasionally, though its onto me for the most part. (oh, yeah, the corrective spelling and such is really accurate as well) also, no software dvorak support, though its rumored this is coming.

uhhh...

maybe a usb port would be nice? (ive run out of things i didnt like...)


overall, id say this is an excellent product. i was skeptical at first, with many things, but the release proved me wrong in most areas. i dont think this is a niche product anymore... its useful in more ways than i thought.
no offence to anyone, as this is my two cents about the bashers: the lack of flash is a good thing, and is not a hinderance to casual surfing; also, the lack of multitasking is not noticable as well, the things that you might want to run simultaneously (music and something else) already do.

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Postby Jif » Tue Apr 06, 2010 10:10 pm

OK IM NOT TROLLING but no USB or SD slot is a deal-breaker for absolutely any tech gadget or peripheral like this. even my gps has an sd slot to add storage and MS just added USB drive support to the xbox. would have taken $2 to add an SD slot to the side of this

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Postby dun dun dun... chips » Tue Apr 06, 2010 10:51 pm


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Postby TexRob » Wed Apr 07, 2010 9:11 am

I don't mean to start a tangent, but I think Chips is just ahead of the curve in terms of what he desires from a PC. I say this, being 32. I used to do the Linux thing, I was on the net back when you had to use Winsock and all kinds of crazy stuff just to get on, I LOVED IT. I used to love "hacking" away at a DOS or Linux command line, to tweak this or that, recompile this or that, blah blah. I grew up absolutely hating Macs, like every true nerd is told to do. I then used a few Macs in a graphic design class they offerred my last year of high school. I was like, "hmm, this is kind of nice", but it was still OS 9, which is vastly inferior to OS X in design, power, and UI. Then I started reading about OS X before it came out, and it sounded amazing. Then a girlfriend at the time really wanted an iMac, so I bought her one, with the hidden agenda of my curiosity. I fell in love with OS X. It's powerful and everything just works, everything is easy as hell to do. Want to install an app? download it and it auto mounts it, and you drag the app to your app folder, and it's installed. Behind the scenes OS X manages all the files, but you just see one icon. As you guys get older, I promise you that you are going to like the idea of a PC that you, your girlfriend, wife, kids, etc can use that they won't infect with W32RAPEMYPC virus 10x a day, and is easy to use. I find that, aside from gaming, the usability of OSX, especially for basic tasks like surfing, etc, is hard to beat.

My point, to get back on topic is that the iPad is this device, to the nth degree. It sounds like from what Chips has said, it is powerful, but easy and intuitive. People have this notion that a device can't be powerful and intuitive.

Good review Chips. I'd have one right now, except my job is uncertain at the moment, and I can't spend the money.

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Postby Darkfoxx » Wed Apr 07, 2010 9:32 am

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Postby TexRob » Wed Apr 07, 2010 9:47 am

Well, that is the thing, and I mentioned it. Intuitive does not mean dumbed down. Apple has some masterful UI development.

Like I said, I think it has to do with having less time. If it weren't for games, I just wouldn't want to mess with that crap anymore.

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Postby Darkfoxx » Wed Apr 07, 2010 9:55 am

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Postby Jif » Wed Apr 07, 2010 12:42 pm

until OSX convinces microsoft to license Direct-X for OSX, there's little to no chance of many games coming to mac. OSX, like linux, uses opengl. how many games are opengl (especially now with the consolitis of xbox games ported to PC). whereas before you coded for each console and PC, now you only have to extensively code for Xbox, tweak/add/adjust for PC, and maybe do a PS3 port. i think PS3 uses opengl but the architecture is so different from x86 that im not sure how much time it would save porting compared to building for OSX from the ground up.

also, no one has ever denied how easy to use Apple products are. they're so easy, in fact, that i think they dumb people down even further. by using a PC over years of time and actually TRYING to learn how they work, you can understand the basic principals of computers, hardware, and software. with an OSX, there's a veil covering every background process and program installer to shelter the user from anything technical. this may be good for grandma, but for a younger kid who is more able to learn computing and will be doing it for their entire life it only hampers their knowledge.

also, i do like many things of OSX. i love the GUI, tho it feels stale after being introduced in like 2002. i guess that's part of the familiarity apple wants with its products. theyve made many significant upgrades under the veil to the OS but i doubt hardly any typical mac user cares or understands.

for me, this veil of computer and the apple proprietary format bullshit are the worst part of all apple products and are deal-breakers. i want to know everything my PC is doing at all times and i hate when it does shit for me. i also taught myself everything i know about computers just by tinkering in windows 3.1 and 95 since i was a boy. outside of Macs, i hate apple forcing me to use their shitty, bloated software to add music to an mp3 player and i hate them banning free and open file formats from being usable on it.

yes, zune's are pretty much exactly the same, here.

and finally, i do not buy pre-built desktop PCs. i dont want their technical support nor hardware warranties. i'll take lifetime warranty gfx cards and memory, 3 year warranty CPUs, mobos, and hard drives, and 1 year warranty everything else and troubleshoot, repair, file for replacement myself then have someone else do it and hope they got it right only to find the warranty on the entire computer already expired. anyone who upgrades various hardware yearly could never own a mac simply because you cant just buy a new motherboard/cpu for a few hundred bucks, you gotta buy a whole new Mac. f that. my 1st computer case lasted 8 years and i had my 1st HDD for 5. you cant get that value in a Mac or most other OEM brands. Apple does use higher quality parts than the likes of HP and Dell (consumer lines) but i could buy my own retail parts and still come out cheaper with better warranties and the ability to pick the exact models i want.

If a Dell desktop is for a dumb PC user, an Apple Mac is for a dumb Dell user.

btw i have an ipod 5.5g and love it. i also have never installed itunes nor booted into the apple firmware/gui. the 1st thing i did after opening it was install rockbox. if not for free opensource projects like rockbox, i never would have bought my ipod with its severely-limited format support.


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