Thoughts On the iPad After a Week
1) The on screen keyboard is better than the iPhone but still much worse than a real keyboard. I’m one of those freaks who can type 100+ words per minute on a regular keyboard with very few errors. On the iPad, even with a week of practice I am much closer to 30-40 wpm, but with far more errors.
2) The auto-correction in iPhone OS continues to be of dubious value. I find that around 75% of the time it auto-corrects well, which is necessary for a system where you can’t really be sure you’re hitting the exact key you want. The other 25% of the time auto-correction causes a major hiccup in my sentence flow. This is really the biggest problem with typing on the iPad. In order to write fluidly you need to be able to type fluidly, with the trust that what you are typing accurately reflects your intent. Unfortunately that is not really possible on an iPad with the on-screen keyboard. My flow is interrupted almost every sentence with a typo that has been converted into auto-correct nonsense.
3) Despite these minor complaints, the overwhelming feeling after using an iPad for a week is the same feeling I got watching Usain Bolt run in the Olympics. The iPad is generations ahead of the rest of the world. This is not an evolutionary upgrade, this is a revolution in almost every way. This is a 3.0 device shipping while no one else has even started their first beta test. The iPad is that rare thing, a new invention that feels like a fully formed creative vision. The iPad is the Toy Story of computers. When Toy Story came out the amazing thing wasn’t just that someone had made a fully CG animated feature film. The amazing thing is that someone made a fully CG animated feature film that was an incredible movie! It was equivalent to someone inventing the motion picture camera and then using it to make Citizen Kane as the very first film. That is the iPad for me, and I want to thank Apple for bringing the future to me way ahead of schedule.
