My iPad 3G arrived on Friday, so after watching other people's shiny new toys I finally got to use my own.

The main use we're planning at my company (or excuse, if you prefer) is to use the iPad as a demonstration device when we exhibit at trade shows. Right now we ship a large iMac to set up in our booth in order to show off our web-based reporting tools. The iMac is a good platform for this, since it gives us an attractive, large display which helps draw people into the booth but doesn't detract from what we're trying to show off.

The iMac has it's downsides, though: it costs over $100 to ship and insure (even ground) each way; the padded shipping crate is heavy and unwieldy; and since we only have one, we can only do one demo at a time, meaning that at busy times we have a lot of people crowded around the one scree

The iPad seems like the perfect alternative. It costs nothing to ship since several will fit into a briefcase to carry onto a flight, it's easy to carry on and off a trade show floor, and we can have several in the booth so we can give multiple one-on-one demonstrations at a tim

After receiving the iPad Friday, I loaded it with a variety of productivity software and tools (mainly Apple's iWork suite, Omnigraffle, and OmniGraphSketcher) on the theory that we may want to actually use the iPads when we're not at a trade show to do real work.

First Impressions

Thursday afternoon, before my 3G model arrived, I was at a technology committee meeting for a local school. Since the non-faculty members of the committee are all technophiles like myself, I wasn't surprised when the pre-meeting discussion was about the iPad. Both of the other non-faculty members had brought a few (non-3G) iPads into their organizations to evaluate, and both had essentially the same conclusion: the iPad is more useful as a business and technology tool than they had expected.

After playing with mine for the weekend, I have to agree. The productivity applications on the iPad are necessarily more limited, but for basic tasks they are significantly faster and more natural to use than the desktop equivalent. The small form-factor, touch interface, and instant-on-always-available quality of the iPad allow the machine to get out of the way of whatever task may be at hand. The fact is that 98% of business tasks do not require advanced features, so it becomes natural to just grab for the pad rather than open the laptop.

A case in point is the OmnigGraphSketcher application. I evaluated this on the desktop a while ago as a charting package and came away unimpressed. The concept is that rather than start with numerical data in a table like every other graphing program, you draw the graph you want freehand and the program makes it look pretty. This didn't work (for me) since I've always found drawing freehand with a mouse to be unnatural, clumsy and imprecise, and I couldn't see why you would want to get away from numerical input data.

On the iPad, however, OmniGraphSketcher becomes and entirely different experience. Sketching a chart with a touch screen is about the most natural thing you can do, and the program takes what you draw freehand and makes it look pretty and professional. The experience is like using a magic whiteboard which takes your rough ideas and turns them into something which looks like a professional graphic artist created it.

Drawbacks

There are some surprising glitches and limitations (which I fully expect will be addressed in a future software update). For me at least, the lack of Flash and multitasking are not problems at al

However, long popup menus render in a way which doesn't look scrollable, meaning that items at the top or bottom of a list can get lost. For such a polished user interface, this usability mistake is surprising.

The lack of printing capability and the clumsy mechanisms for sharing and synchronizing files limit the iPad as a serious workhorse. Right now about the only way to move files on and off the iPad for most programs is through e-mail which, while functional for small files, is really not acceptable for big documents.

I also discovered that while most websites work very well on the iPad, some advanced AJAXy things don't work at all. The touch interface has no way to hover the mouse pointer over things, and there is no way (yet) to do drag-and-drop operations on the touch screen (the drag motion of the fingers is interpreted as a scrolling action and doesn't get padded to Javascript).

I'm typing this article entirely on the on screen keyboard (works surprisingly well) but the fancy WYSIWYG text editor I use on this blog does not work on the iPad at all (so after typing this, I will be cleaning up the formatting from my laptop).

Stray taps also seem to be a problem, and when I type too fast I seem to get a little sloppy and occasionally hit the screen outside the keyboard, moving the insertion point in my text and wreaking havoc on what I'm trying to type.

On the whole, these are minor complaints, and I fully expect they will be fixed in months not years. I can definitely see a day when the iPad or it's successor becomes my primary computing device, with the laptop or desktop only hauled out for particularly demanding tasks.