The iPad isn’t a big iPod touch—an iPod touch is a miniature iPad that restricts the full multitouch experience in exchange for offering greater portability. With the iPad, in contrast, you get multitouch the way it was meant to be done.

That’s one of our many take-aways after having submerged ourselves in iPad land since launch. The larger screen doesn’t just offer more space to work with—it opens up a different and more immersive user experience. Because of this different experience, though, the closed nature of the platform can get under some users’ skin in ways the iPhone and iPod touch do not.

Still, the iPad is likely to just be a starting point for Apple and for multitouch computing in general. There are obvious downsides to the device—we’ll tell you what those are—but it’s clear that it does sit in its own category that floats somewhere between a smartphone and a laptop, and it serves different purposes than either its smaller or bigger siblings. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

A large chunk of the Ars staff contributed to this review, either in the form of writing full sections or by offering feedback and insights based on their own experiences. Because the 3G + WiFi version is not yet on the market, we all tested a WiFi-only iPad. We think it’s worth noting up front that the WiFi-only version is probably best if you only plan to use it at home or at Starbucks—you’ll definitely miss not having an Internet connection while out and about, and the (non-contract) 3G data plans are not bad at all, so long as you can stomach the extra $130 you’ll have to fork over for the privilege.

It’s also the case that there are some parts of the iPad “experience” that we didn’t get to cover here, but we think the next several pages will convey more about what using the iPad is like than you ever thought you wanted to know. So let’s get on with it!

Table of Contents

• Unboxing, form factor, and basic use
• Reading on the iPad
• Watching videos & listening to music with the iPad
• Internet basics: Safari and Mail
• Gaming
• Battery life
• Can you do actual work on it?
• The multitasking debate
• Hardware breakdown
• Benchmarking and Analysis
• Miscellaneous observations/questions from readers
• Conclusion

Unboxing, form factor, and basic use

Unboxing the iPad is the least of the wonders the device has in store, but it is still an Apple product and countless hours of thoughtfulness went into its packaging. We won’t waste many words on this section, but the packaging is a nod to that of the MacBook Air, which itself diverges from the rest of Apple’s products.

The iPad has two speakers which output near the “bottom” of the device.

Inside is the iPad with a thin information packet, a USB 30-pin dock connector, and a wall power charger stored underneath. A dock is sold separately for $30 and, although it pains us as much as it pains you to be nickel and dimed by Apple for seemingly small-but-essential items, we do think it makes life easier when it comes to syncing, typing with a Bluetooth keyboard, turning the iPad into a digital photo frame, and more.

Using the dock to show off album art while we play music out to some speakers

Let’s get physical

When we first played with the iPad at Apple’s media event in January, we said it was comparable to a Kindle DX in terms of size and heft. We’re sticking to that assessment as the closest comparison, although in reality, the iPad is a little bigger and heftier than a Kindle DX. An iPad measures 9.56″ in height, 7.47″ in width, 0.5″ in thickness, and 1.5 pounds (for the WiFi model—1.6 for WiFi + 3G). Comparatively, the Kindle DX is 10.4 tall, 7.2″ wide, and 0.38″ thick while weighing just under 1.2 pounds.

Kindle and iPad side by side

Thickness comparison

Other items that are about 0.5″ thick are the fattest part of (any generation) iPhone, the middle part of a MacBook Air, or a little less than three Triscuit crackers stacked on top of one another. Most iPad users seem to agree that the device is a bit thicker and heavier than expected, but not in a way that makes it too awkward. We do think that the iPad is more difficult than comparable devices to hold in one hand for extended periods of time, and this can be an annoyance for longtime Kindle users.

Like the iPhone, the iPad has a glossy glass face protecting the backlit screen underneath. It’s easily smudged, and with such intended use as the iPad, it’s definitely going to get that way no matter how obsessive you are with hand-washing. It’s easily cleanable too, but we’re somewhat perplexed as to why Apple didn’t include a microfiber cloth like it did with the iPhone. This would be a hugely appreciated gesture, but in its absence, nearly any cloth you have on hand will do.

Welcome to Smudgetown

If it makes you feel any better, the smudges become less noticeable when there are more of them covering the whole screen instead of just parts of it. (That didn’t make you feel better, we know.)

Headphone jack and microphone

Sleep/lock button

Home button and dock/30-pin connector

Volume controls and screen rotation lock

Also like the iPhone, there are minimal buttons and switches on the iPad’s bezel. A sleep/wake switch sits on the top along with a microphone hole and headphone jack, a screen rotation switch adorns the side along with volume controls, and there’s a home button on the front, with a 30-pin connector on the bottom. There’s no SD card slot (you’ll have to wait for the external iPad Camera Connection kit for that), no hard brightness controls (deal with that in the software), and no secret hidden camera (in your dreams—for now).

Computer (not necessarily) required

For better or for worse, Apple seems to have intended for the iPad to be an extension of the computer—technically, you need a Mac or PC in order to activate and sync the iPad when you first get it, so it’s not a computer replacement just yet. However, some less computer-minded users, if they so desire, can get their iPads activated in the Apple Store—just ask an employee to activate it for you (which is what many of us did on launch day). From there, the device could be used autonomously from a computer—apps can be bought from the App Store on iPad, music/TV/movies can be bought from the iTunes Store on iPad, and Web content is accessible via, well, the Web on the iPad. It’s perfectly possible to use this device without owning a “real” computer at all, though we imagine that most of our readers are the types to have too many “real” computers, not too few. (There’s also the probability that you won’t be able to update to future versions of the OS without a computer to sync the iPad against.)

If you choose to sync your iPad with a computer, the official way is to do so through iTunes on the desktop. Once you connect the iPad, iTunes will ask whether you want to set it up as a new device or restore it from another iPhone OS backup of yours (if one exists, either from your iPhone or iPod touch). We don’t recommend restoring from backup upon first sync, though—the iPad is a fundamentally different device than the iPhone or iPod touch and most of your iPhone apps won’t work well on the iPad anyway. Although you could use your iPhone apps, you’ll want to use iPad-specific apps. Trust us.

We recommend setting it up as a new device; from there, the tabs in iTunes will let you set up your applications, music, TV shows, movies, podcasts, photos, and other settings.

Getting files onto the iPad

The process of getting your own files onto the iPad so that they can be used with specific apps is without a doubt one of our least favorite parts of the iPad experience. The device’s focus—at least at launch—is so squarely on selling you files directly from content providers and developers, that official support for users actually putting their own data onto the device is extremely rudimentary and restricted.

You can’t use your iPad as an external storage device (like you can with older, non-touch iPods), and you can’t download files as e-mail attachments and make them visible to specific apps. So if you want to, say, edit a particular document in Pages, or read a particular PDF, there are two ways to match that document with the correct iPad app: 1) Apple’s officially sanctioned method (i.e., with iTunes and a USB cable), and 2) whatever hacked-up technique that some app developer cobbled together to make some kind of syncing for his or her specific little app.

If you don’t mind keeping your iPad tethered to iTunes and a desktop PC in order to manage it, you can use iTunes to transfer files to be used within certain applications. Apple has a helpful support doc on this topic: if you go into iTunes on your desktop and click on the Apps tab with your iPad plugged in, you’ll be able to drag documents onto a specific app’s document list that you want to transfer it to.

In iTunes 9.1 you can transfer files from your desktop to iPad applications which have implemented file sharing.

As for option number two, we’ll just illustrate the current confusion by giving a three brief but representative examples:

1. Comic Zeal’s sync feature involves loading a small “server” program
   onto your Mac, which can then sync data over the network with the Comic
   Zeal app on the iPad.
2. GoodReader, which is one of the most popular and most capable PDF
   readers for iPad, supports a similar “install this server program on your
   desktop, sync over WiFi” approach. But the app also can connect to and
   browse a number of file hosting services, including Dropbox, Box.net, and
   even IMAP accounts.
3. Apple’s iWork apps are the only apps that you can actually use the
   e-mail method with. As we’ll describe in a dedicated section below, the
   iWork apps can see and edit e-mail attachments. You can also transfer
   iWork apps via iTunes, or you can use iWork.com.

The upshot of all this is that if you want to move your own files onto the iPad by transferring them over the network, you’re at the mercy of the app developer, and you may even have to install a special program onto your desktop Mac. If an app doesn’t support your preferred transfer method, then you’ll have to find a way to accommodate that app if you want to use it.

We’d like to think that Apple has a master plan to fix this situation, possibly by adding some sort of MobileMe and iDisk support. But even if that happens, it’s not clear that a universal application sync method based on MobileMe—either via iDisk or through MobileMe’s sync service—is that much of an improvement, at least in MobileMe’s current incarnation. For the time being, more app developers should follow GoodReader’s example and offer explicit support for a range of cloud- and server-based file repositories.

Typing: on screen and off

The vertical keyboard is easier to type on when holding the device with two hands.

Let us say up front that we feel the iPad is primarily meant to be a browsing device—that is, for loading text, and not for loads of text entry. It’s capable of taking plenty of text entry, but we think that using it for text input won’t make for a very compelling experience. More on that soon.

That being said, the iPad’s on-screen keyboard is similar to that of the iPhone, but bigger. This makes it both better and worse, depending on who you are, what you’re doing, and what orientation you’re doing it in (wash your mind out with soap—we’re still talking about the iPad here). The on-screen keyboard in portrait mode is a bit too small to use two-handed like a regular keyboard, but a bit too big to type very quickly or easily with your thumbs. That doesn’t make it useless, however; we think it’s largely meant for entering short text snippets, like putting search terms into Google or entering name of the book you’re trying to buy. Hunt-and-pecking this way isn’t shameful, especially if you’re only entering small bits of text at a time.

The on-screen keyboard in landscape mode is another matter. It takes some getting used to, but we found it much easier than expected to start typing appreciable amounts of text—and fast—using the keyboard this way.

The slowdown here (compared to a “normal” keyboard) is largely related to punctuation and, to a lesser extent numbers and symbols. When we’re typing in full-on “I’m writing sentences” mode, it’s our natural inclination to try to use apostrophes, question marks, exclamation points, etc. Depending on the app you’re in, an Enter or Send key might be in place of where your apostrophe usually is, and you have to hit at least two buttons to get to an end-of-sentence marking.

Like we said, it’s a slowdown—you aren’t likely to crank out an essay at 130 words per minute using the on-screen keyboard, but you are likely to succeed at responding to some e-mail, sending some Twitter updates, or holding a conversation in IM for as long as your patience with your own typing will allow.

The landscape keyboard is easier to type on than you might imagine.

For those committed to entering mass amounts of text on the iPad, you have the option of using Apple’s keyboard dock or a regular dock and a Bluetooth keyboard. For the purposes of this review, we did the latter, using Apple’s generic $30 iPad dock and an Apple wireless keyboard that we had paired with another computer.

Pairing the keyboard is easily done through the Settings app on the iPad. From there, the keyboard can be used to enter text into anything, from a tweet to a full-blown book in something like the Notes app or Pages. But what’s cool—and very surprising—about using a Bluetooth keyboard is that the iPad accepts a number of keyboard commands that we expected to be reserved for “real” computers. We’re referring to things like command+A to select all, command+C to copy, and more.

Additionally, if you’re using an Apple keyboard, the keyboard’s other functions can control various aspects of the iPad. For example, the keyboard’s brightness buttons can bump the iPad’s screen brightness up or down, the volume buttons can change the iPad’s speaker volume, the keyboard’s music player controls can manipulate the iPod app, and so on. We were excited to discover this functionality; it makes the iPad a bit more computer-like when the need arises, and such attention to detail is appreciated. Still, we don’t see ourselves doing this often except in an emergency—say, we’re called upon to cover some breaking news while on vacation with nothing but our iPads. (Hey, it has happened before, but with no iPads.)

One observation we have about this kind of usage is that the hardware keyboard puts our brains into “normal computer mode,” and that’s not how the iPad works.

You can’t scroll a webpage in Safari using the keyboard, for example, and your first inclination after that is to reach out for a mouse—which isn’t there—or tap your space, arrow, or page up and down keys—which don’t work. If you start typing an address in Safari and it offers you suggestions, you can’t use the arrow keys to select the right choice. If you’re posting a long and beleaguered response to a forum thread (someone on the Internet is wrong!), you can’t page through the thread from the keyboard. Furthermore, the special nature of Safari seems to break applications that implement paging using key press events (e.g.The Boston Globe‘s Big Picture, ffffound, or the Tumblr dashboard) to page through items. There seems to be, at this moment, absolutely no good way to use an external keyboard to navigate a webpage on the iPad. The one caveat we found was that you can tab between form elements using the tab key in Mobile Safari. This was the exception to the rule, however.

So if you want to get around the Internet in Safari, you have to reach out with your hand and touch the screen to select things—this feels a bit unnatural. Imagine if you were using your desktop computer with a regular keyboard but had no way to navigate other than to touch a screen that may not even be all that close to you. Granted, we found that this becomes more and more second-nature as time goes on, and it’s likely that, after a few weeks, it would be less of an issue. Still, having a hardware keyboard definitely forces you to interact with the iPad in a different way, and we’re not entirely sure that’s a good thing.

Another slight annoyance is that you can’t switch between the two keyboards (hardware and software) easily. If the iPad is paired with a Bluetooth keyboard, the on-screen keyboard won’t show up if you decide to pick up the iPad and use it in your lap. You can make the software keyboard appear by hitting the eject key on the external keyboard, but that’s only useful if the external keyboard is within reach. Otherwise, you must first turn off Bluetooth or un-pair the keyboard if you want to use the on-screen keyboard.

Another great feature of using the external keyboard is that you can input characters that are impossible using the software keyboard. You can type all manner of special characters by holding down the option and/or shift keys as well as build accented characters in the exact same way you would on your Mac. The only problem we ran into is that most apps, even some built for the iPad, don’t take into account the ability to accept control characters. Just for some example, later in this article we attempted to use iSSH to connect to a remote server, control a screen session, and edit some files in vim. This was more or less impossible using just the keyboard, as the application’s developer likely never considered that someone could input ctrl+a or use a tab key to try and auto-complete a path.

Universal Apps versus iPad apps versus iPhone apps

Left is what it looks like when you launch an iPhone-only app on the iPad. Right is when you blow it up to 2x. Trust us: when you see it in person, the blown up app looks much more pixelated.

The app situation on the iPad is great—there are a ton of apps available, and new ones are added daily. It’s also somewhat confusing, to say the least. Doubly so if you already own another iPhone OS device.

There are iPad apps, iPhone/iPod touch apps, and “Universal” apps. All three will run on your iPad, but iPhone apps are not very pleasant to use. iPhone apps are designed for the iPhone’s much smaller screen, and will show up as such when you launch them on the iPad (see above image). There’s a button in the lower right-hand corner that lets you blow up the interface to 2x size, and that does exactly what you would imagine: it makes the app twice as big and twice as pixelated. So iPhone apps work on the iPad, but you will definitely find yourself thinking “Wow, there had better be an iPad counterpart for this.”

Then there are iPad-only apps which, as you can guess, are designed specifically for the iPad and will not work on the iPhone. A large majority of these apps are designed differently from their iPhone counterparts, mostly to make use of the larger screen space. Finally, there are Universal apps, which are apps that will run at the native size on both an iPhone and an iPad. That is, if you buy a single Universal application and sync it to your iPhone, it will behave as intended on a smaller iPhone screen. If you sync it with an iPad, it will appear full-screen there and take advantage of the iPad’s real estate with whatever extra features the developer chose to add. You know it’s a Universal app in the App Store because there’s a little plus sign next to it.

Some—but not all—developers have wisely chosen to name their iPad-only apps something different than their iPhone-only apps (usually by appending an “HD” or an “XL” or “for iPad” to the end of the application’s name). Why does this matter? Because if you own an iPhone and an iPad and you have downloaded apps from the same company for both devices, you have to figure out which is which when you sync them in iTunes. When syncing one of our iPads for this review, we ended up with “NPR” and “NPR News” on our computers and had no way to tell from the computer which one was the iPad-specific app and which wasn’t—so we synced both and hoped for the best. (By the way, “NPR News” is the iPhone app.) We fully expect the naming issue to change over time as more developers realize that this is a problem, but for now, it can be frustrating.

Reading on the iPad

by John Timmer

Revisiting reading models

When Ars reviewed the first-generation Kindle, we invented a term—”reading model”—to describe how the device’s hardware worked with a specific style of consuming written content. For the Kindle, the slow refresh rate placed an emphasis on consuming single pages of content at a time, and made going through a document in a linear manner the most effective way of reading. This model makes the Kindle extremely well suited to most book reading, reasonably effective with periodicals, and seriously awkward for just about anything else.

The iPad changes things in two significant ways. The first is the arrival of the “app for that” era. Apple will provide you with a free book reader and a Web browser with basic PDF rendering capabilities. But if you don’t like any of these, you can simply replace them, or use a different approach entirely. Don’t like iBooks? You can use someone else’s e-book reader, including Amazon’s Kindle software. Don’t think a Web browser’s the best way to get blog content? Download an RSS reader. I’ve read PDFs in five different applications without even trying very hard.

The end result: you can probably find an application that will present content in a way you’re happy with, and can choose different applications for different types of content.

The elimination of the slow screen refresh of the Kindle also changes the reading model in significant ways. The Kindle’s slow refresh makes almost everything about navigating within a work an involved process—skipping to a specific chapter, searching for text in the work, or even just peeking ahead—all of it is slow, especially if it involves the keyboard. The end result is that tackling a book from front-to-back is far and away the most convenient approach to reading.

With a fast refresh, pretty much none of that applies to the iPad. It’s easy to jump around a work—about as easy as a physical book, and with better search capabilities—or to switch between different features of the book reader, or even jump to other apps entirely. If you’re just reading fiction, this probably isn’t a big deal, but for reference works or textbooks, it’s a substantially different experience.

The actual reading experience

The iPad does bring some new (and good) things to the table when it comes to consuming written content. But these improvements come with serious tradeoffs.

Many people, several Ars editors included, tend to read their Kindle with a single hand, grasping the device from one of the sides. This is difficult on the iPad because you must be careful to not grasp too close to the screen, as you’ll cause inadvertent page turns. With your hand close to the edge of the device, its slippery finish (on both front and back) and increased weight combine to make it extremely difficult to keep hold of; the iPad literally slips through your fingers.

The weight and page-flipping issues makes it necessary to read with both hands—not horrible, but not ideal either—or to read in a position in which you can balance or place the iPad without a need to hold it in your hands. This can be a little problematic if you’re accustomed to reading in bed. Laying the iPad directly onto the bed’s surface and attempting to read it at shallow angle works, but you may begin to notice effects of the LCD, depending on your position.

One solution to the one-handed reading problem is to buy a case. The Apple-branded case is cheap and poorly designed (seriously, save your money), but it’s very light and it enables you to reliably hold the device in one hand.

Depending on the lighting conditions, reflections or fingerprints on the glossy screen may seriously hurt the reading experience. This becomes especially acute in bright sunlight—the device was unreadable when the screen was in the sun, but, with its back to the sun, the glass reflected my brightly lit face. It’s possible to find an angle that more-or-less works in most environments, but you can’t randomly pick how you sit or position the device.

The LCD does have its good points. The touchscreen adds a whole new level of interaction with your books, the rich colors bring another level of realism, and the speed of the LCD is something you’re just never going to get with a Kindle or similar e-ink reader. Readers who find the contrast between text and the background insufficient on a Kindle (aka, my wife) found the iPad to be a much better experience. The downside is the eyestrain that many people experience after extended use of active displays. Two of our staffers, Jacqui Cheng and Jon Stokes, are the poster children for this kind of user. They found that the iPad fell into the “not as bad as expected” category, in part because the in-app brightness controls helped with adjusting to the environment. If eyestrain is a problem for you, however, it’s worth checking out a device in person first, or keeping a Kindle around (if you’ve got one) for extended reading sessions.

Book content: iBooks and Kindle

There’s not a whole lot about iBooks that’s surprising. The program combines a library view for organizing and searching for content to read, a book view, and a bookstore. The book view has a cheesy looking outline that’s meant to evoke a hardcover binding and some unflipped pages, but it ends up looking like something out of a bad Hypercard stack. Still, the reading experience is nice, gestures work as you’d expect, and there are in-app controls for things like screen brightness and display font. Selecting a word lets you look it up in a dictionary, bookmark it, or search for other instances of it in the book. The search function also lets you send it to Safari as a Google or Wikipedia search.

Screen differences

Again, the high contrast between black and white makes for a decent text reading experience, and color illustrations look fantastic. The big feature that seems to be missing is a note-taking capability. It is possible to switch to the Notes application quickly enough due to the general responsiveness of the system, but that makes for a major disruption.

The iBooks shelf on the left, book on the right

An iBook table of contents

The bookstore bills through the iTunes system, but otherwise, remains its own entity—your purchases are made within the iBooks app itself (even if what’s being “purchased” is one of the many free, out-of-copyright books that are on offer). One very nice feature of the store is that free samples, usually about 30 pages worth, are available. When displayed, the samples contain a “Buy” button at the top should you decide to make a purchase—Kindle owners can click the Menu button to buy the book they’re reading.

A final place where iBooks beats the Kindle app is in the little touches present in nearly all of Apple’s apps. You can literally turn a book’s virtual pages, and they respond with nearly true-to-life physics. You can even see the print bleed through the back of the pages. When highlighting you can pick from four different colors, and the highlights look like real marker ink. The color of those bookmarks are preserved in the bookmarks for each book, making it easy to color code your noted passages.

iBooks’ features and nice touches are not enough to make up for the most glaring weakness of the iBooks store: lack of content in comparison with Amazon. That’s likely to change, as the entire e-book publishing system seems to be in flux at the moment but, for now at least, Amazon has a huge advantage over Apple.

Highlighting in iBooks is very nice

Bookmarking is elegant too

Amazon also has a huge advantage over Barnes & Noble, in that it has an iPad-optimized version of its Kindle software ready for launch day. Thanks to Amazon’s system for coordinating purchases across devices, I was able to have my Kindle content on the iPad in a matter of seconds. Like iBooks, the Kindle application includes font and brightness controls, and a scroller across the bottom to adjust where you are in the book. The Kindle software lacks the search functions of iBooks, but does allow note taking in-app; you also have to switch to a Web browser to buy content.

Taking notes in the Kindle app is one of its biggest advantages over iBooks

Highlighting and bookmarks in the Kindle app

Overall, both book reading applications are pretty good, but each has a few features that the other would do well to emulate. Here’s hoping that Amazon and Apple extend their competition to the software arena and start stealing each other’s ideas.

PDF reading

Recently, to avoid hauling my laptop to a volleyball game, I e-mailed a PDF to myself and attempted to read it on an iPhone 3G while on the subway. It was a terrible experience; rendering was slow, you couldn’t select text, and switching to the Notes application caused Mail to forget where you were in the document. The iPad is a lot better off in the PDF department, but the holes that remain in the experience are pretty glaring.

On the good side of the equation, the screen and general system responsiveness make viewing PDFs a pleasure in any application, be it Mail, Safari, or a dedicated PDF handler. Anybody who’s expecting to see the iPhone’s display of a checkerboard pattern for unrendered material will be sorely disappointed. And the two places where you’re most likely to encounter a PDF, Mail and Safari, contain built-in renderers (Mail handles .docx very smoothly, as well).

But, just as in the iBook application, there are some serious drawbacks to reading the PDFs in either Safari or Mail: no inline note taking, and no copying text for quoting. The obvious solution would be to transfer the file to another program but, in the sandboxed world of the iPhone OS, that’s simply not an option. The other option is to use a dedicated PDF reading application, but none of the ones we tested were yet equipped with the ability to transfer files to the iPad via iTunes—one developer indicated that this iTunes PDF transfer feature was a very late add, giving most people very little time to develop or test against it.

So, how to deal with this situation? Jon Stokes has been using GoodReader and pointing it to PDFs he’s storing in his DropBox account; this has worked flawlessly, so far. Two of the apps we tested, Papers and iAnnotate PDF, provide functionality that’s missing from the Safari renderer—you can take notes in Papers, and (obviously) annotate and copy text in iAnnotate. Both apps also provide their own, ad-hoc file sharing solutions. So, for example, provided Papers is open on both the iPad and a computer on the same wireless network, it’s possible to synchronize files between them. For now, however, most of the PDF sync solutions are app-specific, and there’s no simple way to move a PDF between different applications. (See the section above, “Getting files onto the iPad,” for a discussion of how this is a fundamental and iPad-wide problem that Apple needs to solve.)

Another option is converting PDFs to ePub file and transferring them via iTunes. There are a handful of applications that will convert a PDF to the ePub format used by the iBooks application. We downloaded Calibre, a free converter that runs on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. It worked—sort of. On a very text-heavy PDF of an out-of-copyright e-book, the formatting was decent. There were some odd line-breaks throughout the book that were mildly distracting, but it didn’t get in the way of reading.

Image-heavy PDFs were another matter. We downloaded a PDF of the IRB Laws of Rugby Union (Managing Editor Eric Bangeman is a rugby referee), converted it to ePub, added it to iTunes, and synced. The graphics were all messed up, and the formatting issues that resulted made it nearly unreadable. So if you’re going to go the PDF-to-ePub route, make sure you stick with basic, text-heavy PDFs for the time being.

Poor PDF to EPUB conversions are common

Hopefully, Apple will get the PDF issue sorted out in the long term but, for now, matters remain annoying. This is a shame, because the PDF reading experience is great.

Comics

by Ben Kuchera

Nearly all of the functions discussed in this review can be handled by devices you already own, but using the iPad to read comic books is one of the few places where the touchscreen tablet hardware stands alone, at least for now. Apple is aware of how much a selling point a tablet computer is for this application, and has included a copy of the Marvel Comics application pre-loaded in the iPads sent to the first round of reviewers.

Reading digital comics on most devices is a pain: the screens are too small, or you’re confined to the landscape orientation, which forces you to scroll to see entire pages or zoom in to read text.

The iPad, quite simply, was built for this. The colors are bright and beautiful, the text is perfectly legible, and being able to change the orientation of the screen on the fly allows you to adapt your reading to however the artists decided to lay out the panels. We tracked down David Steinberger, who runs Comixology, the company behind the tech that powers both the Marvel app and Comixology’s own app, called Comics. The downloads are free, and once you’re in you can download your comics, with a selection of both paid and free issues.

“We truly believe that there is a distribution issue in comics. We no longer have the newsstand—comics used to be everywhere and you could discover them… the digital stuff is the new feeder system into print,” he told Ars. Comics are locked into Apple’s pricing structure: the cheapest you can sell something is $0.99, the next tier up is $1.99. “Otherwise, you would probably see $1.49,” we’re told.

The way Steinberger sees it, comics going digital only broadens the reach of the art form; traditional comics stores have little to worry about “The first tweet about our app was someone who read Walking Dead #1 for free and they were going to the store to buy it. That’s how I think this is going to work. We’re about allowing people to get comics how and where and when they want,” he explained. “We have the retailer finder built into the app, so you can locate the comic store nearest you. We’re not afraid of print, and we don’t think print should be afraid of digital.”

Comics bought via Comics or the Marvel app also offer something called Guided View. By double-tapping on the screen you enter a mode where different parts of the page are shown at a time, in a kind of zooming, panning cinematic way. This has to be coded for each book. “It’s actually a lot of math—we’re telling the application where to go, what pixels to show, and the masking to do and the color of the mask.” The movement is ultra-smooth, and it adds an extra layer of kinetic energy to the books. Steinberger says most people will still read in one-page mode, but this is worth trying. He also claims Apple has been reactive to their needs: there was a limit of 1,000 items that apps could sell, and when he contacted Apple after they hit 1,000 comics, the limit was raised very quickly.

Steinberger doesn’t seem worried about Apple selling comics through the iBook store, either. “Comics are a particular medium. If you’ve ever tried to read one on the Kindle you’ll understand. (laughs) I don’t think the e-book format is going to handle it very well.” I raised the possibility of buying a physical comic or trade paperback in the store, and entering in an included code to access a digital version on the iPad. “Stay tuned,” he told me.

It’s hard to have a conversation about digital comics without bringing up the reality of .cbr and .cbz files—the scanned, often pirated comics. “I think it’s great whenever anyone gets into comics,” he says at first. “Hopefully we’ll provide a better experience so people will move over to a more legitimate purchase model. For me, we provide a better experience, and we make it easier for people to get comics, and that’s how you beat it.”

Looking at your CBR library on the iPad

Still, the question of CBR compatibility on the iPad has been raised, and many are interested in how exactly CBR readers work on the device. We downloaded Comic Zeal Comic Reader 4, a $7.99 app that features support for your existing comic files. How does it work?

You install the application on your iPad, and then go to the app’s official page and download the syncing application for your PC or Mac. Drag and drop the files from your collection into the app, and it automatically shrinks them and allows you to sync with the iPad application. We tested the system with a big stack of comics, and it shrank the files and zipped them over to the iPad in a few minutes. The app has also been updated since its release to allow you to add comics to your iPad via iTunes, so if you’d like to bypass the second program, you are given that option.

The app does everything you’d like it to, including organizing your collections and letting you know where you left off in each book you were reading. You can zoom around the images, but you’re of course dependent on the skill of those scanning the files, and the art doesn’t look quite as good as you will find in the official, legitimate files from Comics or the Marvel app.

No matter which route you go, reading comics on the iPad is a great experience. The text is easy on the eyes, although direct sunlight kills the iPad’s screen, and both black-and-white and full-color art pops in a way that paper lacks. There is also the small fact that you can now carry a nearly unlimited number of books with you inside the iPad; much easier when you have a long flight ahead of you and you want to finish a series. If you’re willing to dim the screen somewhat, reading comics and listening to music barely sips from the iPad’s surprisingly robust battery, which is another selling point.

Watching videos on the iPad

by Jacqui Cheng

Apple has made it clear from the beginning that the iPad is geared towards the consumption of all types of media, but we think the device’s true forté is in taking video from a variety of sources and displaying it on a crisp screen that’s big enough to enjoy but small enough to carry around with you. The iPad represents the happy medium between trying to watch a TV show on your iPod touch or Zune screen (reserved for emergency purposes only!) or doing so on your 55″ plasma TV. Yes, computers fit somewhere in between, too, but the iPad is made for those times when you’re lounging around on the couch, lying in bed, or waiting on a layover at the airport.

Streaming video (Netflix, ABC, YouTube)

The mere existence of the Netflix iPad app came as a surprise to us, and it’s an understatement to say that we were excited about it and that it delivers. The application is free and allows regular Netflix subscribers to manage their DVD and streaming queues. Most importantly, it also lets you stream your available Watch Instantly titles directly to the iPad.

The Netflix app looks like the webpage, but that’s OK

The Netflix app looks like a WebKit wrapper for Netflix’s regular website (which is mostly fine, since Netflix’s website easily translates to a touchscreen interface), but there are some touches that are available on the iPad that aren’t available in a normal browser. Users can drag right or left through the suggested titles list on the “main” page—an intuitive finger gesture even if you didn’t know it was there.

Streaming content looks great on the iPad. The videos naturally go into fullscreen mode if you view them in landscape, which is the best way to watch them, although they also work in portrait too (with black bars across the top and bottom). Touch the screen to access the controls on the video and adjust the volume, scrub, etc. The picture looks vivid and crisp, even though it’s not technically in HD. Authentication on the Netflix server doesn’t take long (in fact, we subjectively think it takes less time than it does on a real computer), and you can easily pick up watching videos where you left off; Netflix keeps track of where you were in a movie, even if you started it on a computer and later switched to the iPad.

Netflix streaming videos look great

One thing we would love to see in the iPad app would be an in-app screen brightness control. We’re told by the developer community that brightness controls within the iPhone OS are technically a private API (and therefore third parties aren’t supposed to use them), but there are still some non-Apple apps that do allow the user to adjust brightness from within the app. Because of this apparent limitation, we’re not sure it’s fair to criticize an app for this, but because others are doing it, we think it’s at least fair to say that we’d like to have it.

There are, of course, other streaming options available. ABC has an app of its own where you can stream ad-supported shows of Lost, Desperate Housewives, and other shows. We tried it out and came away with observations similar to that of the Netflix app: the ABC app looks great and works well, at least over WiFi.

Yep, it looks like YouTube

Hulu doesn’t yet offer its own app, although one is rumored to be in the works for Hulu’s long-rumored subscription service. Once this hits, we think the iPad will truly have access to most of the TV and movie content that people want to watch on a daily basis.

The iPad’s YouTube app is largely a scaled up and bigger-screen version of the iPhone app, and it works exactly like you would expect YouTube to work. Searching for videos is simple, and the interface is easy to use via touchscreen. Videos go into fullscreen mode when you turn to landscape, but if you choose to view in portrait, you can navigate through the tabs under the video without stopping the stream.

Finally, an app called Stream to Me lets you stream video in a variety of formats from your Mac desktop to the iPad. The iPad app is $2.99, but the media server app that you need to install on your Mac is free; this app handles the necessary transcoding on-the-fly. We briefly tested Stream to Me, and it worked flawlessly with a variety of popular file formats. So right now, this is probably the best option for streaming your own video files onto the iPad over WiFi. Other streaming apps that can connect to UPnP servers are also available, but, as of press time, reviews indicate that most of them are buggy.

Your own (or iTunes) video

Of course, there are times when you’ll want to watch video and you won’t have access to the Internet. Perhaps you’ll be in the passenger seat during a road trip through the middle of Wyoming, or on a long, WiFi-less flight across the ocean. Either way, you can still transfer and watch videos the traditional way by syncing them through iTunes and then accessing them through the “Videos” app on the iPad.

Looking at the Videos application in landscape view, your list of videos are on the left and cover art is on the right.

There’s not much to say except that the interface is intuitive and it works as advertised. As long as a video is formatted in an Apple-friendly format (either because you bought it through iTunes or you converted a movie yourself), it can run on an iPad. Most video applications these days have an Apple product preset that will both make videos into formats that can go on the iPad, but if you need to know the specifics, Apple’s iPad spec sheet says that the device can play H.264 video up to 720p in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov formats. Like most other non-Mac Apple products (iPhone, iPod, Apple TV), the iPad cannot natively play .avi files with any random codec. This is once again disappointing to some users—most notably those who like to download videos from Bit Torrent and watch them on their laptops. It’s not the most ideal solution, but it’s worth noting that we have been able to convert many of those videos to an iPhone/iPad/Apple TV-friendly format by installing Perian and using QuickTime to crunch the conversions.

Live TV

More and more video providers are switching to HTML5 video on the Web, meaning that the ability to watch live broadcasts via Mobile Safari on the iPad is just around the corner. However, if you’re lucky enough to have the right combination of hardware, it’s possible to watch any live TV on the iPad, from anywhere. We happened to have a Mac mini hooked up to a cable connection thanks to Elgato’s eyeTV One (a DVR solution for the Mac), which works with Elgato’s well-designed eyeTV desktop software.

Where are we going with this? Well, there’s a companion app for iPhone, which also works on the iPad, that costs $4.99 in the App Store. The companion app not only lets you manage your TV recordings from the iPhone/iPad, it also lets you stream your recordings to your device and tune into current broadcasts. Basically, it works like a Slingbox, but through an eyeTV and a Mac instead.

We gave it a try through the iPad and came away impressed. Fullscreen TV had very little lag from within the house, and it was an ideal solution for catching a broadcast while in bed, lounging in the yard, or in any other situation where you wouldn’t want to be tied to a TV.

Controlling an HTPC and Apple TV

There’s a certain subset of users who want to use the iPad to control things like an HTPC or an Apple TV. Some of us at Ars are in that subset, as are a number of our readers, so this section felt like an important addition to the review.

Controlling an Apple TV is easy and doesn’t warrant much discussion. Apple’s free Remote app, designed for the iPhone, is available through the App Store, and it allows you to navigate through the Apple TV’s menu system with ease using an iPad. (Hopefully, Apple will update this for the iPad soon.) Text entry is even easier on the iPad version of the app than the iPhone if you choose to blow the app up to 2x size, and we definitely think that this is a preferable way to control an Apple TV compared to the supplied Apple TV remote.

Controlling a Mac mini that’s hooked up to a TV is a much more interesting prospect. We happened to have a mini that acts as an HTPC with Boxee, eyeTV, and regular computery apps (such as VLC and Safari) running. Although there is a Boxee app available on the App Store for iPhone, we find that it’s best limited to the iPhone when there are better options available for the iPad. What’s the better option? A $3.99 app called TouchPad (get the iPad version, not the iPhone version).

TouchPad ain’t much to look at, but it works if you can see the screen that you’re controlling (such as on a TV)

TouchPad lets you use your iPad as, well, a touchpad, so that you can control the mouse on your mini remotely; it also acts as a keyboard for when keyboard input is required. This means that you can not only control the Boxee app on the Mac, but you also can control any application, including a browser, VLC, or whatever else your heart desires. Doing this through an iPad on the network is much more living-room-friendly than having a keyboard and mouse lying around exclusively for HTPC use, although we would much prefer if the application would actually show us the HTPC’s screen on the iPad itself rather than forcing us to watch the TV while touching/typing on the iPad in front of us.

We also discussed some of the merits of an Elgato eyeTV One earlier in this review (Live TV section), but it’s worth mentioning here as well because of the features of the eyeTV One mobile application. The mobile app—again, designed for iPhone and not yet updated for iPad—lets eyeTV users set up and change recordings on their Macs remotely, both over Bonjour on a local network or, if you have an eyeTV account set up, remotely over the Internet. Yes, this can also be done on an iPhone (and it’s a great companion for when you’re out of the house and you remember that you forgot to set a recording!), but the iPad is just as good for this kind of recording management. As we mentioned earlier, you can also play back your recordings (or even live TV) to your iPad from anywhere in the house, making it quite Slingbox-like.

If you want something more VNC-like so that you can see your Mac or Windows machine’s screen on the iPad (say, if you have an HTPC that’s not a Mac mini), there are solutions for that too. We like an $11.99 app called Desktop Connect, which we covered more in the “Can you do actual work on it?” section of this review.

Internet basics: Safari and Mail

by Jacqui Cheng

Safari

While publisher-provided apps can provide a great reading experience that’s designed specifically for the iPad, nothing can top the regular Web when it comes to getting any and all information. Safari on the iPad is a more mature version of Mobile Safari on the iPhone, and it’s as close to the desktop version of Safari as it can get while still being designed for a touchscreen.

Unlike on the iPhone (or any smartphone, really), loading webpages on the iPad truly does not require mobile versions of websites—the normal desktop versions are perfectly good here. Zooming and panning will likely still be required for most sites, but Safari seems faster (possibly because there are more pixels to zoom with) and better suited on the iPad than it does on smaller screens.

Most sites look exactly as you expect them to look

Where Safari on iPad goes beyond Safari on the iPhone is in the details. For one, the search box offers suggestions, making it simple to begin typing a query and select from the available options.Typing a URL works the same way. Safari will suggest pages when you begin typing in the address bar.

Safari auto-completes your searches and addresses

Another key difference is the presence of the bookmarks bar—you can sync bookmarks from your Mac (which we did), or set them up independently on your iPad. Either way, bookmarks are handy to have for quick access to your favorite sites.

A question that many readers have asked is how Safari on the iPad handles tabbed browsing. If you have ever used an iPhone or iPod touch before, it’s similar to that, but in matrix form. Whether the iPad’s grid of thumbnail browser windows actually counts as new “windows” or “new tabs” is up for debate—Apple refers to this as opening things in “new windows,” but we prefer to call them tabs.

You’re able to open new tabs by tapping the window icon at the top of the browser window, at which point you can enter an address or search for something in a blank tab while preserving your original tab. If you find yourself surfing and you want to open a link in a new tab, just tap and hold on the link until the pop-over menu shows up.

If you tap and hold, you can choose how to open new links. The tab/window view is on the right.

From here, you can select whether to open it in your current window, open in a new window, or copy the URL to your clipboard for pasting elsewhere. During our usage, having lots of windows/tabs open at once did not degrade performance in any way.

As everyone that has held an iPad has already observed, surfing the Web on the iPad is fast and looks great. And, as we mentioned earlier in regard to apps, using your hands to interact with webpages feels more intimate and intuitive. At worst, it’s almost same as the Web on the desktop, but in a very portable tablet.

Of course, the one major feature that Safari lacks is Flash support, and this is a continually divisive issue. Proponents of Flash range from those who just want everything on the Web to work (many of us at Ars fall into this category), while opponents claim that it’s an old technology that cripples performance on any machine. Despite most of our desire for some sort of Flash support to be integrated into the iPhone OS, most of our Web surfing without it did not present a problem. Apple has carefully crafted a world in which most applications for Flash in an average user’s life (YouTube, streaming TV shows, videos shown at the New York Times, etc.) are available in other ways on the iPhone OS and therefore the iPad. The one major holdout is, as we mentioned earlier, Hulu, which may be testing a native iPad app for sometime in the future. For now, though, Hulu remains Flash-only on the Web, so this is obviously one area where the lack of Flash might affect someone’s everyday surfing behavior.

Mail

Like most of Apple’s other iPad apps, the built-in Mail application is like a more fleshed-out and easier-to-use iteration of the iPhone version. The app is laid out so that you can view a list of recent messages in a column on the left-hand side if you’re using it in landscape mode while the messages you select display on the right-hand side.

Browsing your inbox in landscape mode is great

Moving a message in landscape mode

If you choose to view Mail in portrait mode, the e-mail message of your choice will take up the entire screen, but a listing of messages will drop down via a pop-over menu.

There’s a new row of buttons across the top of the interface that let you delete, move, or create a new message. Tapping the icon to move a message will change the left-hand column (or the pop-over) to show your e-mail folders, and the app instructs you to choose which folder you want to send that message to.

The Mail interface and pop-overs in portrait mode

If you search by To/From/Subject (new in iPhone OS 3.0 introduced last summer), those results will also display in the left-hand column or pop-over, allowing you to browse through them on the right-hand side of the screen.

Now that we’re done describing what Mail looks like on the iPad, we’ll tell you what it feels like. The pop-over is a very welcome addition to the Mail application, for those of us who are used to Mail on the iPhone; it allows the user to interact with that much more of the app without losing the context of what he or she was already doing (like reading through messages). This is one of our favorite additions to the Mail application.

On the left, the saving images interface. On the right, searching for an e-mail

Other areas where pop-overs help are when saving certain types of attachments, copying/opening links in e-mail messages, and more. Note that there are only certain types of files that you can save to your iPad from Mail (namely, images). If someone sends you a link to an MP3, the link will open in Safari and you’ll be able to listen to it, but you won’t be able to save the file out to the iPad and then play it in another app. Similarly, if an MP3 or a PDF is attached to an e-mail, you can see and/or listen to the media but you can’t save it to your iPad. Many view this as a major and ongoing flaw in how Apple handles Mail in the iPhone OS in general, and we consider it to be a serious annoyance, as well.

One final let-down in Mail is one that carries over from the iPhone: you can only search your inbox by To, From, and Subject fields. Content is not one of the properties you can search within, which limits this functionality.

Gaming

by Ben Kuchera

It’s easy and popular to dismiss the iPad as a larger iPhone, and the iPad’s game selection doesn’t do much to rid players of that idea; many of the games available for the iPad are merely higher-definition versions of games you’ll already seen and played on the iPhone or iPod Touch. In fact, when the hardware arrived, we thought gaming was going to be little more than a value-added feature. But the truth is that the iPad works as well as a dedicated gaming console, and in some ways it’s even better.

What isn’t apparent until you spend a few hours playing across the library of games is that the extra horsepower of the system and the expanded screen size changes the experience of the ported titles, and it adds new possibilities for play to the native titles. With the higher-definition screen, you can see more detail, and on games where you use virtual analog sticks your two thumbs no longer obscure what you need to see. Playing racing games on the large, beautiful screen adds much to your immersion and sense of speed.

Here’s a sample of what we played.

Red Alert

EA offers a version of Red Alert for the iPad that looks great—you can zoom in and out of the battlefield, and movement works exceedingly well. You can either touch a button on the bottom of the screen to select a group of units to move, or simply draw a box around them using three fingers. Place your thumb, index, and middle fingers on the screen and stretch them to draw a box around a group of units, and then drag them to move. This takes a short amount of time to adjust to, but once you do you’ll be picking units, zooming around the map, and playing the game as you always imagined. Real-time strategy games almost seem like they were made for a touch-based interface, and Red Alert proves that you can do it well.

The version of Red Alert for the iPad is more expensive than the same game on the iPhone. But if you compare the game running on the iPhone’s 3.5″ screen at 480 by 320 to the iPad running the same game at 1024 by 768, complete with more detailed models and more room on the 9.7″ screen, it’s very clear that one version will have you wrestling with the screen and squinting at the graphics, and the other allows you to lean back and just play naturally. The difference is striking, and it justifies the extra price. The gameplay is simplified from the original PC game, a decision that can be traced to the game’s iPhone roots, but it remains a fun RTS in small doses.

Red Alert delivers on the promise of real-time strategy on the iPad, but what it really does is whet your appetite for StarCrafton this system. Blizzard, are you listening?

Real Racing HD

48 cars, 12 tracks, $10. Racing titles often feel like they come down to the numbers, but seeing a game as strong as Real Racing get beefed up and ported to a more powerful system can be a beautiful thing. The game defaults to accelerating and braking for you, but you can turn those things off in the options. Don’t expect waggle here—you’ll need fine control of your iPad to steer effectively, and the racing can be intense.

As a visual experience, Real Racing HD is simply beautiful, and it has the framerate to match the graphics. It’s a smooth, enjoyable racing game with both external and internal views, and the large screen of the iPad mixed with headphones and the handheld nature of the system make the entire thing feel much more immersive than what we’re used to on other portable gaming systems. The screen rocks back and forth in the game when you tilt to steer, giving you a little extra feedback to control the game. The ability to add new car skins using your own pictures is a nice touch, but without any real editing capabilities it’s somewhat hit-or-miss.

Quick races, a career mode, local multiplayer, leaderboards–it’s all here. There may not be damage, and the AI may feel unrealistic at times—like most racing games when you’re not playing against real people—but for the money this is an amazing racing game. Tilting the iPad to steer, seeing the world through that large, clear screen—this is an easy game to get lost in, and the experience is enhanced by the hardware, not hindered by it. In all, it’s time-killer par excellence.

We did run into one oddity: since you’re holding the system in landscape mode, be sure your hand isn’t covering the iPad’s speakers. Flipping the system over 180 degrees fixes this, but it’s something you’ll want to be aware of when you’re playing.

N.O.V.A.

This is the iPad’s best-looking first-person shooter so far and it’s… (surprise!) a port of an iPhone game. Again, the graphics have been upgraded and improved, with a few iPad-specific features. To put it simply, the game looks great, although the controls take a while to get used to.

You have a virtual analog stick on the left side of the screen, a button that fires on the right side of the screen, a button for jumping, and a shock attack. A two-finger swipe allows you to throw your grenades. Swiping across the graphic of your weapon changes your gun. All the of the graphical aspects of the UI can be adjusted and moved, which is a nice touch, but the fact remains that you’ll be wishing for a physical control mechanism for the first hour or so.

As someone who plays their games with the mouse and analog sticks inverted, I was surprised to find that my brain didn’t like that control scheme when interacting directly with the screen; switching back to non-inverted controls fixed the problem.

A good variety of environments and weapons across 13 stages keeps things fresh, although you’ll be reminded of Halomany times before the credits run. Other interesting uses of the touch-screen, such as the elevators, hacking minigames, and having to touch specific parts of doors to open them, are gimmicky, but admittedly somewhat fun.

Sign up for Gameloft’s servers and you’ll be able to play deathmatch with up to four other players online, where linking up with your friends is simple. If you’re hanging out at home with your gaming PC you’re not going to be giving up Bad Company 2 for this, but if you need a quick multiplayer fix when you’re on the road, this is a good time. Some matches had lag issues, but overall the experience was smooth. The lack of voice chat was a buzzkill, however.

At $10, you’ll get your money’s worth. Just for an experiment, we downloaded the free version of the original game and ran it on the iPad, in both the tiny view in the middle of the screen and the pixel-doubled mode. The difference is striking; this doesn’t feel like a lazy port. We can’t help but look forward to Gameloft creating a game of this quality from the ground up for the iPad.

Mirror’s Edge

The world of Mirror’s Edge is an interesting one, and it’s a shame that the first game—in what may become a franchise—was so uneven. The iPhone, and now iPad version of the game, strips away all the bad parts of the original and leaves just the fluid running and jumping mechanics. The game is a joy to play, with just a few swiping motions of your finger causing Faith to slide, jump, roll, attack, and in some cases almost fly. It’s a beautiful game, building off the basic mechanics of Canabalt.

The game features a striking aesthetic of whites and reds, and you’ll feel like the master of the rooftops within moments of playing… but you’ll still be challenged. Even the title screen is beautiful, showing the faceless city while the game’s main theme plays. This proves that Mirror’s Edge still has life in it, and the game has been one of my favorites on the iPad; the large screen gives the setting room to breathe.

The problem is the price. At $5 this would be a must-buy, and at $10 it would still be a good deal. But as of the time of this writing’s the game is going for $12.99, and that’s an “introductory price.” An elegant set of controls and a great setting certainly work in this game’s favor, but that’s going to be a hard sell for consumers who just dropped at least $500 for the iPad.

Plants vs. Zombies HD

You know the story on this game, and odds are you’ve already played it on your PC, Mac, or iPhone. You may have already purchased it multiple times, in fact. In full resolution on the iPad, this is the best version, yet. It has the touch controls that made the iPhone version so good, and it includes all the minigames, along with a new minigame called “Buttered Popcorn.”

The iPad allows you to sit back and dig into the game on your couch, or even in the bathroom, without lugging around your laptop or dealing with the tiny iPhone screen. That’s really all that’s being offered here: a bigger screen, and higher-resolution artwork. The price is even higher than the original iPhone version, as the game will run you $10. But it’s worth it. So far, this is the best version of the game, and you once again have an excuse to play through the whole thing again.

But wait, there’s more!

While some of the controls were a little rough, Jumbalaya is a neat game where you simply re-arrange tiles on the screen to make words. Tilting the iPad re-arranges your letters, allowing you to kick-start your head if you start to freeze up. Perfectly priced at $2.99.

Geometry Wars from Activision is also out, with a new game mode added from the Xbox Live original. It’s beautiful on the iPad’s screen, but the button to use your bomb is located directly in the bottom middle of the screen, making it nearly impossible to hit while in the thick of battle, which is when you’ll need it the most. At $10, this is a solid choice for small blasts of gaming.

Flight Control HD is a larger version of the original game, and the experience benefits from the larger maps. It’s an odd mixture of elation and tension to see so many planes flying around the screen, following the flight paths you trace with your finger. The game is $5.

Super Monkey Ball 2 is easier to play simply due to the larger nature and weight of the iPad; making fine movements and small course corrections is easier with the bigger device. With the entirety of the game controlled by tilting the system, you’ll want to avoid this one on car trips, however. The minigames add to the value, but the $10 price is just for launch.

We spoke with Dan Connors, the CEO of TellTale games, about putting the newest episode of the adventure game Sam and Max on the device. He warned that he may be gushing somewhat, as the opportunities presented to adventure games on the iPad are immense. “It’s one of those things that has kind have been holy grail-ish for the type of games we do,” he told Ars “It’s almost a different way of experiencing the game, the way you play it on the device.”

“It opens up the world for us. We’re really excited about ways to present our characters and our stories with this. I can see myself lying in bed playing this thing. It could almost replace a book, which for us as storytellers is really exciting.”

He did note that getting the game ready for the system’s launch was a challenge, although he refused to provide details on how tight the timeframe had been. “It was just buckle down, and lock up the programmers in a room and just pound through it. We took the gaming coming to the PlayStation and PC and made it run on this device with hardware we’ve never seen before for the launch. You can imagine what that was like.”

Connors is, to put it lightly, enthusiastic about the platform. “I’m shocked at how right it feels for many different things that are entertainment-based.” Sam and Max Episode 1: The Penal Zone is available now for $10.

Is this a gaming platform?

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that the large amount of iPhone ports nullifies any potential found in the iPad; the iPhone development community is filled with creative and talented individuals and publishers. The higher resolution, large touch-screen, and relative power of the system puts the iPad squarely into the running with other portable gaming devices from console makers, at least in terms of its potential to host triple-A exclusives. This is a real gaming platform, and it’s one that you will want to spend hours with.

The problem is that so far, the App Store’s initial wave of straight iPhone ports are more expensive than their smaller versions, but our expectations for actual depth are going to increase with the price. First-person shooters at a good frame-rate are possible, but we’ll want stories and online functionality. Real-time strategy games work very well on the iPad, but please, no more hacked-down versions of existing games. Give us brand-new games or full versions of games like StarCraft. Gaming is already immensely popular on the App Store, but most games are simply rubbish; Apple is going to have to find new and better ways to allow higher-quality games to rise to the top if the company wants to keep our interest in the iPad as a first-tier mobile gaming platform.

The possibility for AAA gaming titles with all the bells and whistles we’re used to on the consoles and PC is there, and titles like Real Racing HD show that some developers are getting there. Dungeon Hunter HD is a very capable hack-and-slash, with beautiful graphics for a portable and fully upgradable stats for your character. But there is a very real, and very understandable, fear that we’ll only get upscaled iPhone games and disposable $2 titles. We have to kick out the iPhone ports, and publishers need to start thinking about the larger touch screen in the planning stages. Only having 256MB of RAM to play with is going to be a major problem, but if the launch titles already look and play this good, it’s only going to get better.

There is money to be made creating high-level, longer-playing games for the iPad. Are there any developers who are willing to rise above the muck of phone gaming and throwaway experiences to deliver a serious game that will make you want to buy an iPad just to play? We hope so.

Battery life

by Jacqui Cheng & Clint Ecker

Video and gaming use on full brightness

Apple advertises 10 hours of battery life for viewing video on the iPad, and other reviews around the Web have indicated that people are regularly getting between 11 and 12 hours. In our own tests, we went with full brightness (for you bright screen freaks) with our own stored iTunes videos and got 9 hours of life before needing to recharge. That was with WiFi on and things like e-mail running in the background, with the very occasional non-video task. 9 hours is not quite the advertised 10, but for full brightness, we think it’s fair. A more moderate, middle-level screen brightness would undoubtedly yield much better results.

Heavy 3D games seem to get around six hours of battery life at full brightness, while less graphically intensive games can go for longer. In short, you can get at least six hours of continuous use out of the iPad in the very worst case scenario (constant gaming and video playback on full brightness), and much more if you dim the screen and take breaks.

“Normal” reading/surfing use

Unless you’re stuck on an airplane going across the ocean, it’s pretty rare to be watching video, gaming, or even reading for 9+ hour blocks of time (and even when on an airplane, we usually find something else to do every so often). Many of our readers acknowledged this when we asked for feedback and wanted to know what kind of battery life someone could expect if they were to use the device in an everyday situation—that is, read a few things, put it down on the couch for a while, pick it up again to check out a video, maybe write a few e-mails, put it down again, etc. Could it last through a day that way? A full weekend?

Of course, this kind of usage is entirely subjective, as it depends entirely on how often and how long you’re using the iPad each time you pick it up. That said, we think an iPad could last a whole day of casual use. In our testing with some on-and-off writing on the iPad and some sporadic reading with downtime in between, we managed to go more than 13 hours before hitting 50 percent battery. Given this, you’ll probably need to charge back up every day or so, and a whole weekend might be stretching it, but multi-day stretches seem possible if you use it a little less than we did. We think it would be wise to keep a charger nearby if you’re going to try and go more than a day at a time with the iPad, though.

Recharge inconsistencies

The iPad has one real flaw when it comes to charging. The device is essentially a touchscreen strapped to two huge batteries, giving it 6600 maH of power, but recharging those batteries taxes all but the heftiest powered USB ports. Generally, no port on a hub or older computer will be able to charge the device at all. Only ports on newer computers will be able to charge the iPad while it’s running, and even then, it may take a really, really long time to fully charge the device. Apple’s solution is to use the included wall-charger to efficiently charge the iPad. This charger can supply up to 10W of power, and will charge your iPad in an amount of time you’ve probably become used to on your iPhone.

The iPad power adapter can deliver 10W, two times a normal iPhone wall adapter

What does this mean for the average iPad user? Well first of all, you’re probably going to need at least two cables for your iPad—or you’ll become annoyed by swapping them all the time. Leaving your iPad plugged directly into your computer overnight will probably be sufficient in all but the most extreme cases, but in those instances when you don’t have 8 hours, you’ll need to sync and then move your iPad to a wall charger.

The reason that a wall charger works so much better is that the USB specification only allows for a computer port to supply up to 500 milli-amps of current at 5 volts. This means it can only supply around 2.5W of power to any one device—depending on the quality of your computer, this power might even be divided among all the devices currently in use.The iFixit team has taken measurements that show that the iPad draws, on average, 2.5W of power, thus it’s immediately obvious why using your computer is going to take a really long time, and it may not charge at all if you’re using it heavily.

However, there are exceptions to this rule. Apple states that some (perhaps all?) Intel-based computers manufactured after and including the late-2007 Macbooks can provide up to 1100mA at 5V to a single USB port. We did notice that plugging the iPad into a late-2008 Macbook Pro indicated in System Profiler that an “Extra Operating Current” of 500mA in addition to the standard 500mA (or about 5W) was being delivered. The iPad will charge faster on these computers, but only half as fast as through the wall wart.

Note the new item, “Extra Operating Current”

Plugging the device into a powered hub (unless it is amazingly awesome), into a port on your keyboard, or into a standard Windows PC or on a Mac manufactured before late-2007 will be useless. Using wall charging or battery devices geared towards the iPhone or iPod touch will be a mixed bag (we were able to charge from zero to 100 percent in just over 4 hours using the wall charger). Most will work better than your computer, but they will charge significantly slower than the included 10W iPad wall charger.

One solution that Apple could deploy is a powered iPad dock that both plugs into your computer and into an outlet; dual-cabled docks don’t seem very Apple-like, though.

A second solution would be to further optimize the amount of power an iPad needs to operate. This seems the least likely solution, if only because the device is already extremely efficient and as time goes on we can only presume the power needed by the average consumer will continue to grow.

Can you do actual work on it?

by Eric Bangeman & Clint Ecker

iWork, Keynote, Pages

One of the big questions with the iPad is whether you can get Serious Work done with it. The short answer is yes, with some caveats.

For basic calendaring and e-mailing, the iPad does just fine, as we’ve noted elsewhere in the review. Working with actual documents, however, is more of a pain. Editing a spreadsheet, presentation, or word processing document requires that you purchase the iPad versions of Numbers, Keynote, and Pages from Apple. You’ll also need to plan ahead, because, as we described above, there are only three way to get those docs onto your iPad: iTunes, e-mail, and iWork.com.

iTunes acts as a conduit when your iPad is plugged in. Just select the iPad under “Devices” and navigate to the Apps tab. Scroll down and you’ll see a File Sharing section with two panes underneath: Apps and Documents. You can manually add documents to be synced with your iPad either by dragging them into the Documents pane or via the “add” button.

These Pages documents will be synced to the iPad

Your other option is e-mail. Unlike third-party apps, Apple’s iWork apps can actually see and edit documents that have been sent as e-mail attachments. When you open the e-mail with the iPad, you can preview the document by touching the icon in the e-mail. From preview mode, you can open it in the proper application.

There are a couple of ways to access documents shared through iWork.com. One is simply navigating to iwork.com on the iPad and logging in. Or, when you share the document from the Mac OS X version of an iWork app, you can e-mail yourself a link. Open Mail on the iPad, tap the link, and Safari will be launched, directing you to iWork.com. After you log in, you’ll see each of the documents you’ve shared or have access to. You can download the document as either a PDF or a Pages/Keynote/Numbers document, but it’s a bit odd the way it works. Even if you choose the native app format for the download, it will load within the browser. You’ll need to tap the “Open in Keynote (or Numbers/Pages)” button to actually edit it.

Accessing shared documents via iWork.com. You can download as either a native-format file or PDF

All of the iPad iWork apps provide the basic functionality of their Mac OS X counterparts. With Keynote, you can make edits to chart data, tweak text, and create animation builds, among other things. Pages and Numbers are more true to their Mac counterparts, offering editing features that are closer to what you’ll see on your desktop or laptop. All three of the iPad-specific iWork apps can open their corresponding Microsoft documents with little trouble—much like the desktop versions.

The biggest adjustment when editing a spreadsheet, presentation, or word processing document is applying the touchscreen/smartphone paradigm to a task that you’re accustomed to doing with a keyboard and mouse/trackpad. Each of the iWork apps has a menu bar on the top that allows you access to your documents and to basic editing functions, and when you open iWork for the first time, there’s a tutorial that shows you how each app works. The nuts and bolts of each of the apps are beyond the scope of this article (we’re working on a dedicated iWork review). Suffice it to say that each app offers a subset of the functionality of its desktop counterpart, and each is sufficient to make changes to iWork files.

Entering data into a chart using Keynote

Once you’ve mastered the touchscreen editing paradigm, the next adjustment comes with using the onscreen keyboard. We’ve covered the ins and outs of the iPad keyboard elsewhere in the review, so all we’ll say here is that, unless you’ve got a wireless keyboard synced to your iPad, you’ll need to factor your desire to spend time tapping the virtual keys into the equation.

All of the charts in this review (and most other Ars reviews) were done in Keynote. As an experiment, we decided to try to use the iPad exclusively for the review. It really didn’t work too well. We’ve got some Ars-specific templates set up, and the iPad version of Keynote doesn’t provide sufficient granularity in the edit options to make the charts look the way we like. The other issue we ran into is that the iPad version of Keynote automatically resets the slide size to 1024×768, disregarding the settings already in the presentation.

Editing a graph in Keynote

Our experience with Numbers and Pages was smoother. Again, you’ll need to deal with the interface learning curve, but once you’ve mastered it, you’ll find both apps quite serviceable.

“Serviceable” is probably the best way to describe the iPad’s utility when it comes to doing actual work. For tasks like e-mails and calendaring, it does quite nicely. For more detailed tasks, it will work in a pinch. But there are some other important caveats to note with the iWork apps.

Keynote for iPad doesn’t handle 3D charts or embedded audio. Presenter notes and comments aren’t imported to the iPad, and grouped objects are ungrouped (which could cause problems if you’ve already built your presentation with animations). With iPad Pages, footnotes and endnotes are not imported, non-webpage links are removed, and documents using page layout become word processing docs. Similar to Keynote, 3D charts become 2D charts, but the data is still editable. There is also limited font support in all three iPad iWork apps. Apple lists a handful of issues with the iPad versions of Pages in its Knowledge Base.

In summary, if you’re out of town for the weekend and see an e-mail from the boss telling you he needs a spreadsheet and presentation updated, having the iWork productivity apps could save your bacon if you don’t have a laptop handy. You’ll be able to get done what you need to get done; it will just take you longer than it would have with a laptop, and it will likely be a more frustrating experience. But you’ll need to be careful with complex documents—as noted above, the iPad doesn’t provide all the features of the desktop versions. In some cases, that’s not going to be much of a problem. In others, it could be catastrophic. Our take on the iWork apps: use them for limited or last-minute edits and tweaks, but leave the heavy lifting for the desktop apps.

System Administration

One of the coolest benefits of the iPad for sysadmins is that it’s nothing like attempting to use your iPhone to perform basic administration tasks. There are any number of VNC or RDP clients for the iPad—some of our readers tell us that Desktop Connect works well for both protocols—to view an interact with remote Linux and Windows servers. There are also iPad applications to monitor your Mac OS X servers, administer Cisco and Juniper routers, and SSH into your servers and begin issuing commands. Why are these apps a bigger deal on the iPad than they were on the iPhone? Because these apps on the iPhone were more of a novelty than a way to actually get work done.

Left: Making VOIP calls using iSipSimple. Right: Performing system administration tasks in iSSH.

With the larger screen, larger on-screen keyboard, and especially the ability to attach an external bluetooth keyboard, the entire landscape of system administration on the go changes when moving from an iPhone to an iPad. What’s even better is that with an external keyboard, you can now issue command sequences hitherto impossible (yes I really did SSH into some of our servers and do some hot, hot vim action from my iPad).

The only downside right now is that many developers have not taken into account these new abilities in their apps. Many applications (like iSSH) cannot yet accept extended key sequences like the directional arrows, tab, and control keys. The lack of these could make using applications that rely on those sequences a little hard. We pinged the developer of iSSH on Twitter who confirmed the issues, but also told us that with the actual iPad and wireless keyboard in hard, he should have an update out shortly.

If you want to read more about how the iPad is uniquely suited to system administraiton, here is a convincing account of an administrator who is using the iPad for actual IT work.

Making (VoIP) Phone Calls

Even though the iPad—even the 3G version—doesn’t have any phone support, that shouldn’t stop you from calling people. Yes, you can indeed use your iPad to make phone calls in a pinch—maybe you don’t have a phone, or your battery is dead. There are tons of VOIP apps of various quality on the app store, and, of course, there’s Skype. We found it was trivial to input our Ars VOIP credentials into the $0.99 iSipSimple (there’s a $5.99 version with tons more features) and making voice calls immediately; you can even use the headphones with built-in microphone that came with your iPhone or iPod touch.

Simple note-taking

Many of our readers asked whether the iPad could be used as a simple note-taking device in class or in meetings, and we think that it could—depending on the kind of notes you plan to take. If you’re sticking to all-written notes, the most ideal note-taking solution would probably be to use the iPad with either Apple’s keyboard dock or with an external Bluetooth keyboard, as this would allow for the quickest and most accurate text entry. (The on-screen keyboard isn’t out of the question, but would likely be slower and more tedious than a hardware keyboard.) Taking notes in just the built-in Notes app could work (to be e-mailed to yourself later or synced with your computer), or, you could use a more robust application like Pages.

For those taking notes that might require drawings or equations, the question gets a little more complicated. The best solution we found for this (with a little help from the Internet) was a $0.99 app called SketchPad HD. This app allows you to draw on the screen using your finger or a third-party, iPad-compatible stylus, but you can also type notes in the same document. This could be useful for those taking physics or engineering notes and then syncing them later to a desktop machine.

The multitasking debate

by Jacqui Cheng

The iPad can multitask, but, just like the iPhone, it doesn’t allow third-party applications to run in the background. Apple’s applications can run in the background (Mail can check your e-mail constantly, and the iPod app will continually play music for as long as you let it). But third-party apps are what make the iPad, so Apple’s stance on multitasking has real consequences for the platform. Apple has regularly made the argument that allowing third-party apps to run in the background could have serious effects on battery life, could cause an issue with overall performance, and could open the door for apps to let malware run in the background.

Despite this, there are rumors that Apple is considering some form of limited third-party multitasking support in the next major release of the iPhone OS. The most requested (or complained about) type of “multitasking” that users seem to want is streaming music—as it is now, if you want to listen to streams from Pandora or NPR, their respective apps must be in the foreground at all times or else the stream will stop. So, no rocking out to Pandora and then switching to Twitterrific to fire off a tweet unless you’re willing to stop rocking out for those 30 seconds.

Another major complaint is from users who like to keep chat windows open at all times, whether those are through AIM or an IRC channel (IRC is particularly popular among our readership, of course). The official AIM app tries to get around this limitation by offering push notifications—when you log on via the iPad, the application keeps you online on the server so that when you exit the app, you don’t log off. Instead, if someone IMs you when you’re off doing other things, the server will push down an update to your iPad to tell you that you got an IM:

Those who want to keep IRC running in the background are more out of luck, as are the users of practically anything else that you might normally keep in the background. Heck, even Apple’s own native Videos app doesn’t keep running in the background if you decide to interrupt your own video with a quick check on the weather. It can get frustrating, even for non-techie users.

There is somewhat of a debate brewing over whether users really want this level of multitasking. Although much of the debate is being carried out by Apple fanboys versus Apple haters, there are some serious issues at stake (if you can get past the poo flinging).

One of the reasons some of us like the iPad is because it forces us to stop trying (and usually failing) to do so much at once. Focusing on one task is mentally liberating, especially to those of us who tend to go overboard with tabs, open applications, and stress in our normal computing lives. (Some—but not all—of us involved in this review actually want a computing device that actively forces us to multitask less when we’re not working.) At the same time, for the reasons stated above, the inability to keep certain things running in the background remains a serious crutch for a considerable chunk of users. Luckily, this is not a hardware limitation of the iPad, and therefore can be improved upon in the future if Apple chooses to do so. We can only hope that Apple comes up with an elegant solution to this problem, and soon.

Hardware breakdown

by Jon Stokes

The main application processor that powers the iPad is an Apple-designed system-on-a-chip (SoC) called the A4. Based on the same ARM Cortex A8 processor core and PowerVR SGX GPU core that power the iPhone 3GS, the A4 ups the clockspeed to 1GHz (compared to the 3GS at 600MHz) and gets more performance in exchange for a higher power draw. The exact nature of the advances, if any, that Apple itself contributed to the A4’s design has been the subject of much speculation. Unfortunately, the benchmarks that we present here don’t shed much further light on the subject. Neither does an otherwise interesting teardown done by iFixit—that is, unless Apple’s contribution is not in the SoC design but in the packaging.

The iFixit and Chipworks teardown and X-ray analysis reveals that the A4 is a standard package-on-package (PoP) design, with three different chips crammed into two different packages and connected via wire bonding. At the bottom of the stack is the SoC itself, and positioned above it is another package containing a pair of 128MB Samsung memory chips (Samsung K4X1G323PE). iFixit’s teardown and subsequent examination of the SoC also confirms that it’s single-core—the only possible conclusion based on the size. In all, iFixit concludes, “There’s nothing revolutionary here. In fact, the A4 is quite similar to the Samsung processor Apple uses in the iPhone. The primary focus of this design was minimizing power consumption and cost.”

iFixit’s cross-section of the iPhone’s processor, which uses the same PoP format as the A4. Notice the three dies stacked in two packages. Source: iFixit

As for the GPU, iFixit cites others’ reviews for their conclusion that the GPU is the same PowerVR SGX 585 found in the iPhone 3GS, and until more in-depth software analysis is run, we see no reason to disagree with what was rumored to be and indeed appears to be the case.

Of course, observing that the very first iteration of the A4 doesn’t appear to confer on the iPad any real advantages beyond what would be available from third-party vendors isn’t the same as saying that Apple isn’t serious about eventually making a bespoke ARM SoC that’s customized to the iPad to a degree that it confers a real, double-digit advantage in some key metric (i.e., performance, power, or performance per watt). Apple bought P.A. Semi in mid-2008, and, even if we disbelieve the rumor that most of P.A. Semi’s core team promptly quit and went elsewhere, that’s still not enough time to do a whole lot of in-house, custom work on a brand new IC. I think we’ll have to wait for later versions of the iPad—and later versions of the iPhone, iPod, and as-yet unannounced products—before we really get a sense of what Apple can do in this area.

Other ICs and components that the teardown revealed were: a Samsung MLC NAND flash module, a Broadcomm I/O controller, a Broadcomm wireless module (802.11n and Bluetooth), and chips from TI and NXP. iFixit also found that, “iPad actually has two batteries wired in parallel, for a total of 24.8 Watt-hours.” In all, this gives the iPad 5.5 times the battery capacity of the iPhone.

The other relevant tech specs are either still unknown or were revealed by Apple at launch. In all, the post-launch investigations have so far confirmed what we pretty much already knew: the iPad is essentially a fantastic screen, two big batteries, a 1GHz A8- and PowerVR-powered SoC, with some I/O and memory hardware squeezed in there. It’s lean, and it’s very mean, but any magic Apple pixie dust resides firmly in the software side of the equation. With the exception of the unibody aluminum case, there’s nothing in the hardware that competitors can’t, and won’t, copy in short order.

Benchmarking and Analysis

by Clint Ecker and Jon Stokes

One of the most compelling and exciting points during Steve Jobs’ announcement of the iPad was that the device would be utilizing the A4 custom processor. Divining anything about this processor has been a mixture of science and witchcraft, but we thought we had it all figured out. With the actual release, we’ve found that the iPad is noticeably (both intuitively and quantitatively) faster than its iPhone cousins. Performing real benchmarks on mobile devices are difficult, especially running similar benchmarks across different platforms. Probably the most reliable of these are browser-based benchmarks, but these too come with caveats. They are highly susceptible to influence by different operating systems (the iPad is running version 3.2 and the 3GS running 3.1.3) and different browser versions, which can sometimes bring dramatic increases in the nascent area of JavaScript VM optimization.

All that being said, we can tell you that right now the iPad is significantly faster than any smartphone we’ve tested. It’s our opinion this is largely due to the 1GHz clockspeed of the new processor, Apple’s A4, but we’ll talk about this issue a little later. In our battery of Web-based benchmarks, the iPad consistently outperformed all mobile comers, in some cases by quite a wide margin. First we’ll look at the benchmarks, and then we’ll talk about why the iPad is so much faster than the competition.

Browser-based Benchmarking

by Clint Ecker

We ran two separate JavaScript benchmarks, the WebKit project’s SunSpider suite and Google’s V8 JavaScript benchmark. Of note here is that we used both versions 3 and 5 of the V8 benchmark. Version five did not complete on many of the “lesser” devices, only succeeding on the Nexus One and iPad. The two tests vary in their aims, but the main differences are that SunSpider performs a mix of real-world operations—tests that stress real problems faced by real Web developers—in addition to a number of pure mathematical tests.

Google’s V8 benchmark also has a mix of tests, but is slightly more skewed towards the mathematical side of things.

For these tests, we ran each benchmark on each revision of iPhone hardware and recorded the results, which you can see below.

Sunspider (lower is better)

The Sunspider tests show a modest 39% improvement and falls well within the realm of improvements that can be attributed to processor speedups.

Google V8 (higher is better)

These V8 tests show a 273% improvement over the 3GS (in version 3). How is this possible if the Cortex A8 in the iPad has only a 66 percent clockspeed advantage over the Cortex A8 in the 3GS? We’re actually not completely certain, but our gut feeling is that the extremely math-bound nature of these tests is contributing to the speedup. We see similar extreme speedups in synthetic benchmarks that could be attributed to aggressive “loop optimized out by compiler” speedups. It’s possible these same types of optimizations are kicking in on Safari’s SquirrelFish JavaScript engine and being amplified by the processing gains in the A4.

Page render tests (uncached/cached)

Outside of JavaScript performance, the new hardware and browser contribute greatly to raw page load and page rendering performance. When a webpage is loaded, a potentially large XML-like document needs to be rendered and normalized. In addition, a large number of layout calculations must be performed and potentially large chunks of memory have to be allocated to pull in anywhere from tens to hundreds of images, JavaScript, and CSS documents.

Since the only significant performance upgrade in the iPad is its new A4 processor (memory remains the same), we can mostly attribute any speedups we see here to improved processing power. Again, this presumes that any changes to Mobile Safari’s rendering engine and JavaScript engine are minor or non-existent. Since the A4 is essentially the same processor in the 3GS running at a higher clock speed and perhaps some unknown gating improvements by the Apple crew, we would expect to see a maximum of a 66 percent improvement in any processor-bound benchmark.

We decided to test these speedups by loading a varied selection of websites. We used a small set of websites which exemplify the types of sites individuals are likely to use on their iPads. These are Ars Technica, Google Buzz, The Chicago Tribune, and the Ars Technica Facebook page.

We loaded each of these websites four times, twice un-cached and twice cached on each device (iPad and 3GS) running their latest software (3.1.2 on the 3GS and 3.2 on the iPad) and running on the same WiFi connection. We decided to normalize the network interface so we could show that the speedups were only the result of improved hardware and not glitches in the radio interface (or the result of a vastly slower EDGE or 3G connection).

We measured the total time to load the page from when the “Go” button was clicked until the loading progress indicator stopped, and the “stop” button reverted to a “reload” button. We then averaged all of the measurements to produce a single, representative number for each device. Not the most scientific calculation in the world, but it is a meaningful number: the average load times of a varied number of common sites, in various stages of being cached and un-cached. We then summed the numbers for each device and generated an “overall page load time” across cached and uncached loads for the four sites.

From this number, we see that across all these loads, the iPad results in a 46 percent improvement. These are significant improvements, and they’re well in-line with what we’d expect given the increase in processing power from the A4 processor rather than from improvements lurking in updates to rendering and JavaScript engines.

We see that the iPad’s biggest advantage is when loading complex websites with many scripts and assets. The Chicago Tribune site is notorious for being a beast on mobile devices, the iPad loads, parses, and renders the site more than two times as fast as the speediest iPhone. These gains are noticeable but not as significant in light-weight pages like Ars and Facebook. However, if you do a lot of browsing on your iPad, the gains will definitely begin to stack up over time.

Qualitative assessments of running similar apps on different iPhone/iPad devices

Outside of browser-based benchmarking, we can attempt to load a large application on both devices and measure how long it takes to get to the action. With the bifurcation of the applications on the store today, it’s starting to become difficult to do this. You can’t bench an iPad app on iPhone hardware, for example, so running an iPhone app on the iPad is probably the best we can do. Star Defense is a game that has an extended startup time and works well for this purpose.

Star Defense (iPhone version) Main Menu:

• iPad: 15.97
• iPhone 3GS: 22.37

If you weren’t already convinced by the data shown above, we see here that even an older game like Star Defense gets a modest 6-7 seconds shaved off the startup time. This might sound like minutiae, but the point is that these small gains will manifest themselves all over the place, and during tasks where the speedups might not be immediately apparent.

Why is the iPad so fast?

There are two possible reasons for the iPad’s blazing speed in the browser-based benchmarks listed above: 1) software, and 2) hardware. There has been a lot of interest in the hardware side of the equation, because of the fact that the iPad’s A4 is Apple’s first attempt at a custom CPU. Inquiring minds want to know: just how much did the A4 benefit from Apple’s acquisition of P.A. Semi, or even ARM design shop Intrinsity (if the rumor proves true).

As we’ve discussed above, it’s very difficult to isolate the performance of the A4 itself by benchmarking it against other mobile chips, because it’s impossible to find a truly fair comparison. The most apples-to-apples comparison for the iPad is the iPhone 3GS. The other popular baseline for comparing the iPad is the Google/HTC Nexus One, which is based around Qualcomm’s Snapdragon SoC; but the Nexus One is more like apples-to-pears, for reasons we’ll talk about in a moment.

iPad vs. iPhone 3GS

The 3GS is a decent baseline for the A4 because it uses a third-party SoC based on the same core as the A4, ARM’s Cortex A8. But there’s a very important difference between the 3GS’s A8 and that of the iPad: the 3GS CPU runs at 600MHz, while the iPad’s A4 runs at 1GHz.

Because the A8 has a relatively simple dual-issue, 13-stage, in-order pipeline, performance on most CPU-bound workloads can be expected to increase fairly linearly with clockspeed. So with a clockspeed 1.66 times that of the 3GS, the A4 should generally be about 1.66 times as fast at CPU-bound tasks. In areas where the A4’s advantage is less than 1.66, we can look for bottlenecks like memory bandwidth or networking, but in areas where it’s faster than we expect we can attribute the advantage either to the iPad’s software or to some bottleneck in the 3GS.

As for potential 3GS bottlenecks that make the iPad look good by comparison, two come immediately to mind. The first possible problem is the iPhone OS, which is at an earlier version right now than the iPad. So some of these benchmarks may change with the next iPhone OS update—and, given the level of internal and external secrecy that Apple has held the iPad and the A4 under during the months when the iPad was being finished, some of the wider performance gaps may narrow drastically once the 3GS can benefit from the secret optimization work that was done on the iPad.

The other possibility is that there are some instances where the iPhone 3GS is being deliberately throttled to conserve battery life, while the bigger iPad can just run full-bore. It’s hard to imagine how this would affect the 3GS (maybe the 3GS’s network interface is being put to sleep and woken back up a lot, and this slows down loads?), but it seems plausible enough.

In general, though, places where the iPad is about 50 percent faster are easily explainable by the bigger device’s clockspeed advantage. So while the average speedup we’re seeing is significant, it’s perfectly in line with what we’d expect from a higher-clocked version of the same in-order processor.

iPad vs. Nexus One

The next closest comparison to the iPad is the Nexus One—Anandtech was the first to benchmark the two mobiles against each other, and our results align with his.

The main reason that the Nexus One presents itself as comparable to the iPad is that both the Nexus One and the iPad use a 1GHz ARM-based SoC. But there’s more to the fact that Apple’s 1GHz A4 beat the pants off the Nexus One’s 1GHz Snapdragon than you might think from just looking at so-called “speeds and feeds.”

The Nexus One’s Snapdragon, codenamed Scorpion and designed from the ground up by Qualcomm, is often compared to a Cortex A8, but the two are actually different in a key respect. Both parts are dual-issue, in-order designs, but Scorpion allegedly has a longer pipeline than the Cortex A8, because it’s designed to do 1GHz at 45nm and still fit within a mobile phone’s power envelope. If Scorpion’s pipeline is indeed longer, then it uses less power at 1GHz on the same process than A4, and it also offers less performance. Ultimately, I think that the Snapdragon’s longer pipeline accounts for a large part of the performance delta between the iPad and Nexus One.

The other part is software—Google’s software is just slower, and Google gets to be a little bit embarrassed by that (or, at least, they should be). In Google’s defense, Android has to run on a wider variety of hardware, so it may be tougher to optimize. But the delta really seems wider than it should be, and it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Apple just out-coded the search giant here.

Miscellaneous observations/questions from readers

by Ars Staff

We have received a number of questions from our readers about the iPad, and we have made a number of observations that don’t seem to belong in their own sections in this review. So, we decided to just make a list of one-liners that address some of those issues.

• The iPad doesn’t always charge when plugged into my Mac Pro (via the USB port on an Apple Cinema Display). I plugged it in this morning at 49%. When I checked 2 hours later, the battery was at 63%, but the status said “Not Charging.”
• Icons on the iPad’s home screen rearrange themselves when you switch between portrait and landscape mode. This makes sense since more icons can fit across the screen in landscape, but it’s annoying to those of us who are control freaks and like to keep the same icons in the same places at all times.
• Some readers asked whether it was possible to connect an iPhone to an iPad, either to charge the iPhone or to tether the iPad to the iPhone in order to use the iPhone’s wireless connection. The answer is no and no, unless some third party comes up with a 30-pin to 30-pin connector without Apple’s blessing, succeeds in bringing it to market, and writes software to make the two devices transfer data over the cable.
• During our testing, we used the iPad extensively for long hours at a time and did not notice a heat problem. We did notice it getting slightly “warm,” but nothing even close to hot. This was all indoors, however—we have seen people online observe that the iPad gets very hot when sitting out in direct sunlight.
• The WiFi version of the iPad does not have real GPS like the 3G version does, but it does have a built-in compass (a la the iPhone 3GS). It also has the same “fake” GPS based on Skyhook Wireless that the original iPhone uses.
• Street View in Google Maps is far cooler to use on the iPad than on the iPhone.
• The iPad does not currently allow multiple user accounts—couples or families sharing one iPad will have to find some way to play nice together.
• The back of the iPad can get scratchy fairly easily if you’re not using a case with it. Think: the top of a MacBook Pro, or the back of an original iPhone. The front of the iPad is a pretty resilient glass that is not easily scratchable (though people have been known to do it on their iPhones). We recommend at least using a basic fabric sleeve when you throw the iPad into a bag, if not a more full-fledged case.
• The iPod app is very different than that on the iPhone, and we’re not entirely sure how we feel about it. There’s no Cover Flow view, which is suspicious considering the large and beautiful screen. We didn’t end up using the iPod app very much in our testing, though, except when hooked up to some external speakers and for displaying cover art.
• Calendaring on the iPad is everything the iPhone version wishes it could be, but can’t. We really like the many ways in which information can be displayed thanks to the larger screen—list form is particularly useful to see what events are coming up.
• You can change both your standard background wallpaper as well as the lock screen wallpaper, and not just to Apple’s selection of wallpapers either. You can choose your own photo to go behind your application icons, which you can’t do on other iPhone OS devices.
• Besides a Bluetooth keyboard, you can also pair a Bluetooth stereo headset with the iPad. Sorry, no Bluetooth mice.
• Many of us observed that the built-in speakers on the iPad were not half bad for most casual usage (certainly better than expected). Audiophiles will still want to use headphones, though.
• Some users have reported issues with their iPads dropping WiFi connections. Apple has a support doc up that acknowledges the issue, though the solutions are somewhat limited.

Conclusion

The iPad is many different things to many different people, and writing a conclusion that sums it up for everyone is impossible (in fact, it’s pretty difficult to write one just summing up the Ars staff’s feelings alone, and we’re a pretty tight-knit group). Though we only highlighted a small handful of apps in this review, it’s important to note that most of us think that the software makes the iPad. This first round of applications is quite good overall, but what comes in the future from Apple and third-parties alike will likely take the iPad to much greater heights.

Truthfully, this device is one that can only really be understood by playing with it firsthand (we know, it took us more than 18,000 words to tell you that). No matter how many words get spilled on the iPad, there’s still no simple way to describe how it feels and how it’s different from a typical computing or smartphone experience. Those of us on staff who were highly skeptical about the iPad before having touched it had a very different understanding of it after spending some serious time with the device. This is likely to be the case with most users.

The iPad has numerous flaws—most of which can be fixed with software updates, and we hope that they will be—but it’s still a device that will undoubtedly kick off a shift in how the general population interacts with software and content. As pointed out by Omni Group CEO Ken Case at the Macworld Expo, even if the first iPad doesn’t end up being a hit, multitouch devices where users interact directly with what’s on the screen is the future. “In five to ten years, there will be really big multitouch screens, like on an iMac or something, and we’ll be touching and moving things around instead of clicking and dragging. This effort is an investment in the future. It’s forcing us to look at our applications—for the iPad and the Mac—in a completely different way and improve upon it as user interaction changes,” he said. We agree.