The pre-purchase iPad review

One of these days, hopefully sooner rather than later, I will have a magical and revolutionary device to call my own. However, I won't bother waiting till then to start reviewing the damn thing. :)

I played with it for a little more than an hour at the Apple store next door to the office, and then some more when I'd visited the store again...and then again. Yes, I've heard of buying things on the Internet, but I'm determined to walk out of a store with one now. :)

There are enough reviews out there and I'm joining the unwashed faithful that are buying the device to see what the hell it is. So instead, I'll list the reasons why I think I"m going to get frustrated by the device despite by plans to buy one soon; maybe I'll be proved wrong

• No multitasking is going to suck big time: I'm very used to music in the background while surfing. Apparently I'm going to have to wait till Fall till the update. Sigh.
• The screen size means I keep wanting to use it like a laptop instead of an iPod and that leads to frustration; let me explain what that means. When I was browsing sites, I kept wanting to download and install stuff (plug-ins, software etc.) Of course, that's not possible. Perhaps I'll get used to this on the iPad, but this is not the future of tablet computing, which I'm pretty bullish on.
• No flash = No hulu + no a lot of other websites I'm used to.
• The screen gets dirty with touch. Let me explain what a big deal this is, simply because I noticed it. I'm the kind of person that doesn't notice entire layers of filth on my laptop screen, and wait till I get disapproving comments from my wife or colleagues before I realize this and clean it. The smudges on the screen, including the ones I was just responsible for, were amongst the first things I noticed when playing with the iPad. Given that most of the killers app need a great screen experience and the need for touch to do anything interest, this is going to be an issue with usability. Also, there's clearly an opportunity of an important innovation in material science here.
• The thing is heavy
• Email was hard to do; I typed up a couple of responses and it took a while for me to get used to the keyboard spacing and my fingers missed the tactile feedback....also more smudges.
• Tethering (i.e. associating it with a desktop/laptop) is necessary for a lot of operations including moving music and photo libraries to the device, and the iPad completely ignores the cloud which is somewhat of a fail. They may fix it with time, but I doubt it'll be quickly enough to satisfy me.
• Most of the apps still haven't upgraded to account for the better resolution, which is a shame... and I have a feeling it'll take a while before that happens.

This of course ignores a lot of things that are great about the device (particularly the iBook reader), but more on that once I actually get my hands on one to take home.:)