Relax Your Face!

The Build Up
Saturday was a gorgeous day in the city and after a morning full of errands, which concluded with hair cuts for me and my son at Astor Place, we decided to take a walk to the Apple store on W 14th so he could play some of the games and I could get some more hands on with the iPad. The only problem with our ingenious plan was that the Apple store was insane with crowds of people gathered around the nearly entire 1st floor displays devoted to the iPad.

I had been considering a purchase of the Cupertino “magical” device all week reading through various reviews about the “oversized iPod touch” and the “next best thing since sliced bread”. Standing there among the crowd I thought might as well take the plunge and see for myself. Twenty minutes later after my son grew tired of waiting for an open computer we left the store and I had a shiny new iPad in tow. It would take another hour and half before I got the chance to unbox, sync (ugh!), and really dive into the device. The ramblings that follow are my impressions after a full day with the device.

Magic Hour
The first question I set out to answer for myself was “What is the iPad?” I know what the iPhone is even with AT&T making it difficult for it to serve that primary function. The iTouch is also an easy one to define with the iPod at its forefront, but what the hell is the iPad? Earlier in the week I read a really great review by John Gruber of Daring Fireball that struck a chord with me while I started to get accustomed with the device. The comment was about the applications themselves being the magic. It was like a light switch went on as I jumped in and out of several applications that were downloaded throughout the day and the iPad became the application. One minute I had my own Netflix viewer and the next I was holding a James Rollins novel. I know what your thinking, “So what the iPhone will be able to do that” and you would be right but with the iPhone you get a cool almost watered down version but with the iPad it becomes the full focus and it is done so well that you probably won’t want to use the iPhone version of these apps.

Touchdown!
The ultimate value of the device didn’t really hit me until a couple of hours into playing with the iPad when I decided to check out the Marvel Comic Book app. My son has been on a big super heroes fix lately and you can’t really blame him with all the movies like The Hulk, Iron Man, Wolverine, and Spiderman. After launching the application, I called him over to see one of the free comic books they offer (The Hulk) and we started to flip through it. He was so focused on doing his best to read every word of it. He was captivated by the flow of the book and was able to move through it without much prompting. I should have preempted this with how much difficulty we have been having with him reading and trying to find new ways to engage him with books and that’s when I said to myself “Touchdown!” I can see how the iPad will allow us to help with his learning and get him prepared for the standardized tests he will face next year and that alone is worth its weight in gold.

…. To Be Continued (More App reviews, user interface, and future wishes)