Finally got my hands on an iPad

But didn't buy it, mind you!

I was roaming Gatwick airport, after a succession of well unexpected (I was flying Easyjet) efficiencies left me with a couple of hours to kill before boarding. From all the "airport shops" I really only can barely stand the "gadget" ones (I could do with HMV too before I moved on to iTunes) so there I went to Dixons to have a look at anything they could throw at me.

And yes, they did have some iPads. The first thing that struck me is how they seemed to be extremely popular with children. I almost had to fight them off the things: I also wanted to play, and they seemed quite absorbed by some kind of game. Once I got one I could easily see the good response of the UI. Whenever I thought of tactile interfaces I was always thinking of the ticket machines in Madrid's underground: sometimes it felt the only way of "selecting" something was by punching it, rather than fondling it. In the iPad case very light touches are enough to trigger actions. Then the UI feels extremely well polished and all the default apps seem to have a "point" (I mean, "wobbly boobs" app didn't seem to be installed in that particular case. Neither iMaraca, though this one may make a bit more sense on an iPhone).

To me the whole idea of using the same surface for input and for output makes a lot more sense that using an "output only" screen and then to have a minimal trackpad input that has to be extrapolated to movements in a much bigger screen. What is worse, the trackpad is, so to say, "remapped" every time you raise you finger from the surface and drop it back again. Of course, technically it only passes "vectors" that apply to the current mouse position but my point is that all the mental math hampers users. People gets used to it, of course, but then some people also got used to programming assembler for IBM mainframes. But intuitive it wasn't. What it better than "touch exactly the point of the screen that you want to interact to"? Forget about single interaction points, vectors, movements, how do I get up there, etc. Just a one to one mapping between input and output, with no scaling.

The main concerns about the iPad interface remain textual input and "fine selection" (e.g. select a single character in a text, or a pixel on an image). For the first I can say it is obviously much better than any mobile but way worse than a "proper" keyboard, specially for "touch typers" like me. The second could be achieved with the very easy "pinch zoom" features, but still may fall a bit short.

And BTW, I will still probably not buy it, £700 for the 64MB 3G (the one I feel would be useful enough) is a bit too much for me, and I have never considered myself anything close to an "early adopter". But then who knows. If I ever buy it (hint for Apple: lower the price) I will write a proper review here.