The secret of the iPad's success

I received my iPad last Saturday, and in that short time it has muscled its way into my daily life in a way that only the iPhone had done before. Prior to Saturday, my workdays were mostly spent at my desk in front of an iMac, or on the road with either an MSI Wind netbook or an IBM Thinkpad from work.

What makes the iPad so useful to me? Here are the features I now cannot live without:

• Battery life: I can go more than an entire day on a single charge with the iPads insanely long battery life. I haven't yet run out of power in a day, but I'm estimating easily 10 hours of life on the thing. Probably substantially more. That means that I finally have a device that can keep up with me whether I'm flying across the continent or just wandering off to a local coffee shop to work.


• Mobility: I can grab the iPad at a moment's notice and take it with me wherever I need to go. No more fumbling around for a charger, unplugging it from USB hubs, and making sure I have all my accessories. I can even leave the Bluetooth keyboard behind and get by reasonably well with the onscreen keyboard. And when I grab it, it already has all of my music, movies, podcasts and TV shows ready to go.


• Size: The iPad is nearly the perfect size. Right now I have the iPad on a stand and am typing on my Bluetooth keyboard. I can easily ready what I'm typing from a comfortable distance. I find the iPad fits in my hand just about perfectly. The screen is so much more useable than my netbook (amazing how much more usable 1024x768 is for the Web rather than 1024x600). The ability to quickly re-orient the display to portrait or landscape is a simple, obvious addition, but one that radically improves the usability of the device as a book, magazine and Web site reader.


• Applications: The included email application is even faster for me to use than Entourage or Outlook. The calendar is also a superior experience to my usual desktop applications. And I'm already impressed with the available applications for the device. I've got a great office suite (iWork), a gorgeous database (Bento), a really fun sketching program (Sketchbook), some impressive news applications (BBC News, Thomson Reuters, USA Today), a fantastic Twitter client (Twittelator), an amazing flight simulator (X-Plane), great book and magazine reading (iBooks, Kindle reader, Zinio), some good games and a variety of other pieces of software. In fact, I already have over 50 apps installed on the device already and I haven't even spent $80. On a laptop I'd have dropped that just for the office suite. And lets not forget that Safari makes a great mobile browsing experience.

They say every rose has its thorns, and the iPad has some things that could stand improving. Here are the things that bother me most:

• Weight: The iPad is a bit heavier than one might like to hold for long periods of time, although it is far from heavy - especially compared with my laptop or netbook. Still, in a perfect world, I'd ask for even less weight. That said, most of its competitors appear to be on the heavier side. The Joo Joo tablet is a full pound heavier.


• Keyboard shortcuts: There aren't enough shortcuts for the Bluetooth keyboard in the current apps. I'm imaging as developers become more accustomed to the external keyboard as input this will change, but for now I do wish I had a few more keyboard shortcuts.


• Printing: It would be nice to be able to print from the iPad. Currently, you have to sync with your desktop and print from there. That said, I don't print a lot of stuff any more. But it still might be nice to have.

Here are the things that seem to bother the tech pundits and my geekier friends, and where I tend to agree (or disagree) with them:

• No multitasking: I'm a skeptic of multitasking on mobile devices. After having numerous problems with errant applications making it impossible to answer a phone call on my old Blackberry, I decided for a device like that multitasking was too risky. If someone can implement multitasking and make sure it does not destroy the user experience, I'd be all for it. Rumors are Apple will be announcing multitasking as a part of the iPhone OS 4.0 this Thursday. I'm cautiously optimistic they'll make sure any of that multitasking goodness won't come with the problems I've had on other devices. Still, I'm pretty happy with the single-tasking nature of the iPad. It is so quick to stop and start applications that it really hasn't bothered me. But for some applications (radio streaming, etc.) multitasking would be very nice.


• No USB ports: I really do not want my iPad to become the hub of an octopus of connections, so the simplicity of a single connection appeals to me. I plan to get the camera connection kit to connect the iPad to a SD card so that I can easily transfer photos from my camera when on a long trip. But I don't see a need to attach a bunch of accessories to my iPad via USB. I rarely use my USB ports on my netbook, mainly just for backing the thing up to a backup drive. iTunes takes care of backing up the iPad.


• No camera: I'm not a big fan of Web cameras. I work from home and would rather not have to worry about my hair, clothing, etc. when communicating. I can't see the reason why I'd want to take pictures with the iPad... my iPhone and a dedicated camera fill that bill for me just fine. I have a Web cam on my netbook that I literally have never used for anything other than just testing to see if it works. Apple will probably add a camera to the device, but I probably won't use it any more than I do the Web cams on my computers.

Did I miss any pros or cons? I'd be curious to hear if others share (or don't share) my use cases...