Apple iPad launch weekend roundup
By Ross Miller 
posted April 5th 2010 8:31PM
posted April 5th 2010 8:31PM
Reviews
Apple iPad review
Accessories hands-on / micro-review
Engadget Podcast 190: iPad Edition
...It's here!
Launch event coverage
First 3G iPad sighted in the wild, Woz plays it cool by riding a Segway
iPad line watch: the few, the proud?
Josh (and the iPad) on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon!
iPad apps
News and Magazines
Utilities
Social Networking
Games
Scrabble's iPhone-assisted Party Play
Netflix and ABC Player hands-on
iDisplay: the best concept, most horrific execution award goes to...
Defining experiences from the first wave
Editorial
Editorial: iPad app prices are out of control and will kill us all
Entelligence: the iPad as a productivity tool
iPass? The best present and future alternatives
Misc.
Hey, look at that: iFixit's ripping an iPad to shreds
iPad OS digging reveals hints of future iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, and Nessie
Chargin woes: USB hubs, non-Macs and weak ports not rejuvenating
Apple's A4 SoC faces Qualcomm Snapdragon in knock-down-drag-out benchmark
iPad 'Spirit' jailbreak demonstrated by MuscleNerd, now it really is magical
Screen Grabs: LeBron James overlooks iPad at MLB season opener
Will it blend? iPad edition
Scottevest debuts 'iPad compatible' clothing line, the world cringes
P.S. -- Don't forget, you can always exclude all Apple or all iPad coverage from your Engadget experience.
What is an ipad?
@nickyP It's a gadget!!
@nickyP
ask your grandma she probably has one
Now charging $4.99 for apps that cost $0.99 on the iPhone? Give me a break!! If you're an iPad owner and you do this, you are a complete moron! You're basically paying $5 for flash games you can play in a browser for free.
@cc3d Not the iPad browser...
@cc3d
It's a free market - they can charge whatever they want, and if they get an idiot or two good for them. But I expect they will soon learn that at those prices, after the initial honeymoon period wears off, they will have killed a lot of their business, at which point competitors will swoop in and snap up those bitterly looking for an alternative.
@kidvalor
What you have to understand is that there are more apps for the iPad then there are applications for the Mac computers.
As much as I despise the iPad, mainly because how people are losing their shit over it and all the free publicity.
Engadgets coverage was pretty solid.
@Pearl Jam
+1 for the Pearl Jam love.
You know what's more annoying? The fact that engadget has provided an apple free remedy for all you cry babies, and yet you still come and post in apple threads, just to complain about so much Apple coverage. Fuckin pathetic. You know what I do if i don't particularly care about a certain news article...I DON'T READ IT, AND I DON'T POST IN IT.
@marilicious18
GET IT THROUGH YOUR HEAD...the EXCLUDE link is an insult. I don't want to EXCLUDE Apple news...I USE Apple products...I want to know about the iPad. But I don't CARE that Lebron James LOOKED at one. Do you not see the difference? All these superfluous articles are junk...spam...a tool to try and get as much coverage of the device as is possible without having the actual content. There are 150,000 apps in the app store. Are we to have a review of each one?
I want proper reviews...OBJECTIVE reviews, of devices so I can make informed choices. Knowing They showed it to Jimmy Fallon does not add to my informed state. Telling me I NEED a 10 inch compass does not engender respect in their opinion. glossing over huge limitations is NOT informative.
Please take even 5 minutes and actually LOOK at the round up and decide, how much of it was actually informative and how many other devices were afforded such blatant free advertising. This isn't about Apple hate. It's about journalism.
@ssgadget I like turtles.
@cslawren they have a URL for that http://www.engadget.com/include/AnythingElsePlease
I just wanted to thank you guys for not drowning us in iPad "news" and keeping up with everything else going on in the gadget universe as well as maintaining objectivity. You're not Gizmodo--that's for damn sure.
@nomistake
JooJoo sucks man.
Here's what I learned this weekend:
1. Not a single reviewer mentioned the USB charging issue? Big deal or not...it should have made it into a review.
2. Apple has determined that not being able to print is part of being revolutionary.
3. Having only one source for software means they get to charge whatever they want.
@KenEsq .. Lots of reviews have mentioned the USB charging issue. Get back to me when you can charge your netbook over USB.
@KenEsq
You suck at Economics. There are tons and tons of, for example, "Note taking" apps and "Tower Defense" apps which drives the price down. It's got nothing to do with there only being one App Store.
If you're suggesting that there's not enough competition in the AppStore, wait another week and they'll be at 200,000 Apps.
As for you printing comment, I refer you to the iPhone's Copy/Paste implementation for a magical and mystical preview of the future. Believe it or not, Apple can actually... add less important features later.
Gasp!
@taligent
I'm talking about all of the major reviews that came out before launch. None of them mentioned the charging issue at all. I'm not sure what a netbook has to do with my comment...it's pretty clear a lot of the reviewers out there aren't really doing much testing/use before writing their articles. Certainly, it's worth mentioning.
@Wesscoast
What I'm suggesting is that there is NO competition for the App Store.
As for your comment about printing. I'm sure they can add it later...but something so revolutionary might have included such a basic feature. I mean this is an OS that has now been around for roughly three years. Hey, maybe until they get it done users can steal a pen from the Apple Store and use it to copy the data they want...or put tracing paper over the screen to get a picture.
Wait, I know they can plug the iPad into the netbook and then transfer it over to get a hard copy.
Keep those personal insults coming...they really strengthen your argument.
@KenEsq "I mean this is an OS that has now been around for roughly three years."
Ever heard of updates? Or you want a new OS every year?
With your logic OSX is almost 8 years old, yet it is pretty darn good.
"What I'm suggesting is that there is NO competition for the App Store."
And there is no competition to the software market in general. What's your point?
Revolution just means radical change. IMO, a word processing app, and a spreadsheet app designed specifically for a touchscreen is a pretty radical change already, considering for how long we've been using a mouse.
@Atkins
But that "revolution" happened with the iPod Touch/iPhone. Is there any substantive difference between the OS on those devices and on the iPad? That's the problem. Where's the revolution? They made a bigger machine that lacks some features that simpler devices have had for decades (ability to send to a printer).
Right now the iPad seems to be a Sony PSP killer. Great graphics, fast hardware and tons of games. It's a good tact on Apple's part...people buy game machines...and by wrapping things like an e-reader into the software they also give people the "excuse". (Oh, I don't play games I got this to read/track my stocks/write my thesis,).
@KenEsq
Why would you want an alternative for the App Store that only services their company's devices? Would you like an alternative for the World Wide Web too? Please give us your reasons.
@onlymyrailgun
Same reason I like having multiple places to buy hardware and software for other computing devices. Resellers can and will charge different prices. Also, it might be nice if another store didn't exclude software that it believed to be competitive to its own.
In ~1995 people were screaming that Microsoft was bundling a browser with it's OS and it was too hard to download an alternative (Netscape). In 2010 Apple is doing the same thing that Microsoft did and has gone a step further and won't even allow any thing competitive to be installed.
That's another story though. I was mostly referring to how pricing of Apps...the quality applications that make buying the iPad a worthwhile mobile computing device are not going to have to be competitively priced.
When I buy a game for my son's XBox 360 I have a myriad of places to choose from where to get that game...and the price can differ greatly. Same goes for applications for my PC.
@RickStar
Well that doesn't sound too surprising...
@Adamd21 .. I really wish selfish people like yourself would just leave Engadget. So what if they went into a lot of depth about a product people on here are interested in and that makes them money.
They provided a way for you to exclude iPad articles. So use it !!!
@ssgadget .. given the number of comments for every iPad article I would argue that a lot of us readers are interested in the iPad as well.
@cslawren .. do you not understand how Engadget works ?
When a product is released and is popular they write lots of articles. I suggest you take your mind back to when Windows Phone 7 was announced:
http://www.engadget.com/tag/wp7s/
Lots of in-depth articles that whilst I won't buy the phone (I have a Mac) was very, very interested in.
I wish people like you would stop encouraging Engadget to write less articles and be less thorough. It helps nobody.
@RickStar Well, if people like you continue posting on those articles, how will that happen?
Also, don't forget to use your scroll button when you are not interested.
While I think there were more articles than was necessary to cover the iPad, I do think you guys did a fair job adding some non-iPad articles in the mix and definitely tempered it some (relative to announcement day). So for that, thanks. Some of your peers definitely overdid it (and continue to), even going as far as posting obscenity laced apologist nonsense. I congratulate you on keeping it reasonable, even if the comments aren't.
Beyond that, the review seemed pretty fair and didn't stretch too far to apologize for the shortcomings.
After playing with it a little myself, I fall into the group who simply couldn't find a place for it in my life (have an iPhone 3G, Droid, Lenovo x200t and a workstation), at least in its current iteration. When a tablet is released that has an 11-12" display with around 16:10 aspect with 1440x900 or better, along with a real pressure-sensitive wacom or N-trig digitizer to go along with the capacitive screen, THEN I will be interested in this market segment. A tablet with no real ability to take notes and annotate documents (using a crayon-level accurate pogo stylus doesn't count) isn't a tablet at all.
Hey, did u guys know that the engadget app is loaded on all the demo ipads at the apple store. Congrats Engadget! Now I have a question. Who thinks that engadget is for just nerds or who thinks that is it a site for the masses.
I was just thinking about how on the pod cast during the ipad keynote. They were talking about how they were getting amazing amounts of traffic. Who was that from. Was it from just the masses. I am starting to feel that engadget is starting to become more for the masses. Something like the tech section of yahoo. I love engadget and read every post, but I am starting to think that it is becoming a yahoo or nytimes ?????
@Adamd21 Why can't you just scroll? When you read a paper magazine and there is something uninteresting I am pretty sure you just flip the page... Or you take the phone and call the editors? You don't help your case by posting here also.
I think the coverage is pretty normal, considering the popularity of the product. In fact I am surprised that they made the effort of writing a thorough review of this Joojoo, about which nobody cares.
I love peoples reaction to coverage. For some reason, many want Engadget to have the same coverage for a JooJoo oR anything else. Perhaps we anew to understand that coverage will be determined by the masses. 300,000 sales in 24 hours on a device probably warrants a new websites coverage a heck of a lot more than a JooJoo's sales.
It's also amusing to see the Apple haters denounce everything. Probably the same people who said Zune's would kill iPods are now declaring still vaporware products will blow away a real product on sale such as the Courier.
So the iPad does have some features like HDMI output. Yeah it doesn't have multi-tasking either (until it gets hacked in the next week or so).
But the deciders are not going to be us geeks who flock to Engadget, decrying certain feature losses.
The deciders are the consumers. The masses. The pre-teens. The teens. The elderly.
I don't see many of the mass market begging for a HP for their birthday. I don't see an average 50yo non-techie decrying the lack of Flash support either. Microsoft haven't exactly got a cool reputation to them either
It's not always a battle of technical superiority. It's a battle for consumer dollars. I love competition. It keeps products improving. But for anyone to say the iPad is junk or not a signIficant product release seems rather ignorant.
Even now, no manufacturers are remotely offering anything equivalent. It may be many months before they do. It took the industry a few years to catch up with the iPhone. Even then we do have to credit Apple for much of the phone touchscreen and App Store work.
@Fletch +1.
@Fletch - I don't think any can deny that Apple has done yet another fabulous job. The entire iPad/iPhone experience and the tremendous ecosystem (iTunes, App Store), and accessories market, didn't happen by accident.
What most people are pissed about is the intense coverage of even the most trivial aspects of the device. It's like going to a friends house and being subjected to 5 straight hours of every photo and home video he has ever made of his children. Argh ! You don't hate the kid, or your friend, but you certainly wish he'll go easy on the information overload.
@Fletch I'm happy with Engadget's coverage. I think it was the right amount. I think they were fair. However, I think the 300,000 people argument is a little overused. If Apple came out with a toaster tomorrow, the same 300,000 people would buy it. Apple makes some sleek products--not necessarily technologically advanced...mostly just pretty. And it's gained them a small but dedicated user base.
@Dull There are also more people in China than any other country. So what ? People magazine doesn't do an article for every Chinese person born.
@taligent - or alot of readers are interested in dissing Engadget for being such a iPad whore ?
I'm just sick of Apple in general. The vibe they give out is we are better then you. It starts with their commercials where they make an attempt to piss on anything Windows related and it ends with the end user sucking their cock acting like every device Apple makes comes from god.
OMG! An ipad article about allll the other Ipad articles.
Like I've said before. Engadget completely misses the point when it comes to this "exclude" thing. I like reading about Apple but the amount of irrelevant articles really over saturated the website over the last few days.
An article about someone waiting outside the store. Was that really needed? No, not in my opinion. An article about how to buy your ipad. Again not needed. Numerous articles about apps? Why not just have them in one article and reduce the clutter. I'm now expected the same treatment for Android when their next major product is released.
Like I said I don't mind reading about Apple and certainly don't want to use the "exclude" option but sometimes a bit of balance and a bit of common sense is needed.
Wow. That is a bit list of stories about one product launch. Apple *should* be paying you for all this coverage. What a deal!
Hi there,
i like your wallpaper on the ipad! could you tell me where to get it?
thanks in advance.
Engadget needs a iPad section. Seeing how the iPad news are literally told every single day.
I think the iPad's a cool device, but with a little help, it could be better.
engadget.com/ipad
even Hitler wasn't impressed:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQnT0zp8Ya4
@speculatrix
bah, they've taken it down. shame, it was one of the best remakes of the famous hitler rant in a while.
Had to return my first one due to the Wifi problem that somehow doesnt get reported here. They gave me a new one which so far works great.
Can't wait for the monthly roundup
seems like some people have some sense.
http://www.socialtimes.com/2010/04/why-im-returning-my-apple-ipad-appl/
After having spent the last four days with my 32gb ipad, i am sadly reminded of how Apple still doesn't give a damm about the visually impaired, the blind, or even the hearing impaired and deaf folks out there.
In my case i am legally blind and can not see on a white background. the ipad(also the iphone) has the option of doing white on black, but not all pages are white to begin with. the white on black just indiscriminately reverses whatever the page color is. Oh yeah, it turns photos into negatives(just like it does on the iphone and on imac, mac pros, etc).
Don't get me wrong here, this is a good device, but it could be so much better it a little more thought had gone into the user interface. I have been writing, emailing, and calling Apple to fix this very simple issue, but i have never ever received a reply whatsoever.
I guess i am asking too much for myself and others that have eyesight issues that require simple UI changes to make our live so much easier.
Speaking of hearing. Have you all noticed that the volume levels doing certain tasks like watching a movie is very weak and at doing other tasks like games very loud?
My vision requires me to use a high contrast black color scheme... I wish i could see normally just like most of the rest of you guys do, but i don't and i just wish companies like apple(just to name a few would listen to us and make simple changes that would me(us) to change the background color, font sizes and color so that i(we) can enjoy these products just as much as you guys do.....
end of rant