I have a 32GB Wi-Fi only iPad.
The biggest surprise I’ve had out of mine is the battery life. It is unbelievable – literally, to the point that I thought the battery indicator wasn’t working properly when I first bought it – how slowly the battery drains, both during standby and active use. If you’re coming from a laptop that needs to be charged every five or six hours, the difference will be mindblowing.
One of the downsides has been that some of the apps don’t communicate with each other as well as I’d like. This is more a problem for the developers than Apple, obviously. It’s great when Twitter integrates with my chosen RSS app (substitute a service where you consume and sometimes like to share, and a service where you share stuff to), but when they don’t it seems like a bigger barrier to copy something, then switch apps, then paste and post, then switch back and find my place again. I suppose it’s really no different than doing that on a desktop, but since you’re limited to one app running at a time, it feels like a bigger deal. Luckily, most of these apps now integrate with most of these services, so it’s not a huge problem.
The upcoming iOS 4.2 (in November) for iPad will incorporate some of the new stuff the iPhone has gotten recently, like “multitasking” (quotes because it’s only kinda multitasking), which may have an effect on both of the issues in the paragraphs above.
Memory seems like pretty dependent on what you want to do with it – with kids and such, it might be more useful to have a bunch of space. Personally, I don’t go on a lot of trips and when I do I’m driving or otherwise occupied, so I don’t feel the need to carry my entire library (movies or music) around with me all the time.
I’ve got about 2400 songs, 2 feature-length movies and a bunch of shorter ones, a couple thousand photos and over 100 apps on mine right now, and I’ve got almost 4 GB of the 32 GB left (the usable capacity on a 32 GB is actually around 29 GB). Encoding settings and size of apps and such will obviously make these numbers vary pretty significantly, but I’ve found 32 GB to be more than adequate for me.
As a vague point of reference, most of my movies are encoded at 800-something by 350-450-something (depending on their original aspect ratio), set up so they take about 1.5 GB of space each, and that’s more than sufficient for me on the iPad’s screen. Of course I’ve always seen these movies “on the big screen”, meaning at least TV if not theater, and so my brain fills in the details.
Given that there’s no USB port and general file system, it’s a bit of a pain getting anything not directly Apple-sanctioned (i.e. movies, music, podcasts, audiobooks, ebooks, apps and photos) onto or off of the thing, and darn near impossible if you’re not at your “home computer” (where you sync your iPad). There are good .pdf and other file readers, and apps that create and open files in various formats, but aside from transferring them through iTunes, email or Dropbox sometimes works (if the file’s small enough and the iPad recognizes the file format and knows which program to use it with), and that’s pretty much it. I don’t run into this problem a lot, but when I do it can be frustrating.
As far as the books go, Amazon offers a Kindle App that is basically that: You can buy Kindle books through Amazon’s store, and read them on iPad. They automatically, wirelessly sync to any other Kindle apps or devices you own too, so if in the future you should get a Kindle or another Apple device, your purchases will be readable there. You can see the Kindle store here.
All that said, I’ve been – and remain – impressed with my iPad since I bought it on day one. I don’t own a laptop, and paired with a Bluetooth keyboard it works well for my very light media creation needs. For media consumption it’s wonderful – browsing news feeds at the coffeeshop (I read the paper newspaper, then check my news feeds and Twitter and such until I’m ready to leave), reading books from Apple’s iBooks or the Amazon Kindle app before falling asleep, that sort of thing. Here’s one, I use Instapaper to save long articles I want to read but can’t spend the time on right now (I find many of these over the course of my day at work, for example), and then fill little pockets of time by knocking out the list one by one. More productive than playing a game or scanning here or whatever, plus they’re accessible even when you don’t have a signal.
