Second impressions

* It’s got sex appeal, make no mistake. You could go out to a public park with a baby, a beagle puppy and a big-eyed stuffed turtle and you wouldn’t draw the crowd an iPad does. It certainly hits all Apple’s usual markers for industrial design.

* If it’s a big iPod Touch, the key word is definitely BIG. Having 1024×768 scale changes everything, making for a better UI experience and a lot easier time with things like mail or reading complex websites (you don’t need a Facebook app for the iPad, you just go to Facebook).

* The killer app, for me, is the battery life. This is the thing Apple has done: they have used a phone OS to get light and lean, while still including a first-rate browser – the net result blows away any netbook you like for speed while offering ridiculous battery performance (after almost 7 hours of off-and-on browsing and mail and even some video, I’ve still only blown off 1/3 of the charge). Better than my MacBook Pro, better than my Dell Mini 1012 (in Ubuntu OR WinXP), better than my iPhone – hell, I could use all three of those one after the other until the batteries all died, and I think an iPad would outlast them all. Now in fairness I’ve been using it on a college campus with pervasive Wi-Fi, not taxing it with the need to hold a 3G signal, but even so – this is something you can take around for email and web surfing all day and not have to worry about when you’re going to plug it in. For that reason alone, I think it has a lot of potential not just as a netbook killer, but as a MacBook Air killer.

* I mean, seriously, think about it. What do you do on a netbook? What CAN you do on a netbook? The physical keyboard may give it a slight edge on the text-entry front, in theory, but (in horizontal mode at least) the iPad’s virtual keyboard is every bit as viable as my netbook’s physical one in practice. I can check my mail, I can surf the web – well, the iPad does those things as well if not better (I’m generally stuck on webmail with the netbook, because using Thunderbird or Evolution is painful on that screen and with that processing power.) I could input with Google Docs or Evernote if I wanted text, I’ve got the WordPress app right there for blogging things – hell, right now the only thing I absolutely need the netbook for over the iPad would be video chat. And that’s not exactly a huge part of my life.

* If you’re doing all this stuff in the cloud anyway, you can get by fine with 16 GB of storage. Hell, get all your movies from Netflix and you don’t need to use your local space. I guarantee you that the notional Google Chrome OS devices aren’t going to have 16 GB of local storage. All the “cloud” really consists of is a move back to the old client-server days, and the iPad is the thinnest of thin clients.

* Yes, you can RDP back to your Windows machine – just not very well. Similarly, I expect VNC would be kind of a show. I don’t think you’re going to get Apple Remote Desktop for iPad for some time, unfortunately.

* The iPad, at its root, is a consumption device. You read mail, read books, surf the web, watch video, listen to audio. It’s necessarily compromised for things like churning out flashing newsletters or hammering out the Great American Novel or administering a rack of servers. I certainly wouldn’t undertake NaNoWriMo on one. But the people breathlessly intoning “this is your new TV” – I think they’re onto something. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, this is going to be a big part of how you see your shows. (The notional Hulu app will go a long way there.)

* I think the biggest impact of the iPad is yet to come – I don’t think the apps that are going to make it indispensable exist yet. I think much will depend on what happens with the developers who just now have one in their hands. I also think much will depend on what gets discussed on Thursday, when the iPhone 4 talk takes place in Cupertino. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more and more consolidation in what is emerging as OS X Mobile, for lack of a better word – in stark contrast to the fragmentation currently happening with Android.

* All of this said, I’m probably going to pass it along to the next tech by the end of the week if not sooner. When you have a laptop and an iPhone, it’s definitely a device too far. It’s not a substitute for a laptop for people who legitimately have to work remotely or on-the-go (by contrast, it’s the IDEAL device to give your CxO so he can look slick in the first class lounge). And for my purposes, it’s neat…but it’s not really suitable for Twitter, or text messaging, or walking around with the headphones in on a constant stream of the Junks. I downloaded a ton of the free iPad apps, but most of them are things I don’t use or aren’t practical – Pandora, ABC Player, Y! Entertainment, two or three news apps, stuff like that. Until portable devices become the prime way of consuming media, the iPhone is still the best horse for the course for me.