The quality of the program really shapes your experience.
If you are looking at it purely from a hardware angle, then sure you could argue that.
However, I think these people are clearly missing the point.
Some of my favorites are Instapaper Pro, USA Today, AIM, and Twitterriffic.
Oh, and the ability to run and scale up iPhone apps is basically useless.
If it’s crucial that you run an iPhone app on your iPad, it works fine.
But the user experience is crap and it’s really not worth it.
I don’t think I have any iPhone-only apps on my iPad.
I’m really looking forward to a Reeder iPad app for Google Reader sync.
I spend A LOT of time in Google Reader and their website is not ideal for the iPad.
Twitterrific on the iPad
Performance
The iPad is SO fast!
But, it was way faster than even my highest expectations.
Interacting with the iPad is immediate and completely intuitive.
Also, I have not heard a single noise from the iPad.
It’s dead silent.
Hardware
The hardware is exactly what we’ve come to expect from Apple.
The industrial design is elegant and the machine feels rock solid.
Apple did a great job with the weight distribution so the iPad feels perfectly balanced.
I really like the ability to lock the screen rotation.
The iPad battery is incredible!
It has been lasting between 10-12 hours for us with normal use.
We have been charging it every couple days.
Currently the iPad does not support these gestures, but hopefully they will be added in a future update.
Virtual Keyboard
A lot of people have been asking me about the virtual keyboard.
This seems to be a big concern for many people.
I’d say that the keyboard is basically what I expected.
The main thing to remember is that the iPad is more about consuming content rather than creating it.
My biggest issue so far has been missing the spacebar between words.
Luckily, the iPad autocorrect is incredible and usually adds the space for me.
It seems to be much more powerful (and accurate) than the autocorrect in iPhone 3.1.
I read A LOT of articles/posts each day and the iPad has almost completely taken over this role.
I found that I prefer to use the iPad in landscape mode.
This is a stark contrast to my iPhone, which I almost exclusively use in portrait mode.
Web video on the iPad has performed better than expected.
Most of my favorite sites provide slick HTML 5 video for their content.
The YouTube app is great and Vimeo.com provides HTML 5 support for their videos.
I’ve streamed some HD content from Vimeo and it looks and runs great.
There are, however, a good amount of videos that simply do not work.
I find that almost all embedded videos (with the exception of YouTube) do not work.
Conclusion
The iPad is easily the most exciting computer I’ve ever used.
There is no amount of reviews or videos you could watch to get a full grasp of the machine.
