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I had a chance to try the iPad yesterday at the Apple store in the Ann Arbor Mall. Yesterday was, of course, the launch day for the iPad, and the store was very busy. My initial impression when I picked up the demo model was that it was quite a bit heavier than I had imagined. According to Apple’s product page, the (wifi only) iPad is 680 grams, while the iPhone is 135 grams. So, if you can imagine holding five iPhones, that’s about what holding an iPad feels like. It’s certainly nothing overbearing; if anything it makes it feel like a more substantial product, which leads to the next thing I noticed: it feels very solid. The back and sides are one piece of aluminum, much like the unibody MacBook Pros, which wraps around and replaces the space occupied by the shiny bezel on the iPhone. Apple’s phone almost feels cheap by comparison. All the buttons and switches are plastic but still pleasant to use. Overall, it feels like a very well constructed device.

It’s been noted on other, more thorough write-ups, but one of the most obvious things about the iPad is the speed and responsiveness of the interface. It changes orientation almost instantly, and I was able to try all of the first-party applications in just a few minutes. These apps are all pretty impressive, but if I had to pick, I’d say the ones that best took advantage of the iPad’s form factor are the web browser (Safari), the e-book reader (iBooks), and the office suite (iWork). Using your finger to browse the web or read a book feels undeniably better than using a mouse. The only part that might leave something to be desired is the keyboard, which could cause problems for people wanting to post more than a Facebook status update or a Tweet. The office suite is much nicer than one would expect. The team at Apple came up with some very intuitive ways to easily manipulate images, data, graphs, etc. It will be interesting to see what other types of content creation applications are developed for this platform, but again, it remains to be seen how fast typing is possible on the screen. Just from using it in the store, it seems like a skill that requires a week or two to learn properly.

At first glance, the iPad is a nice gadget, and I think it has a lot of potential to be a great media consumption/production device as well as a research tool. I’d really like to see iPad versions of Papers and Evernote (two of my favorite Mac applications) before judging its usefulness in this latter category.

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