Review: Will Apple's iPad conquer Britain?

By DAILY MAIL REPORTER
Updated: 05:22 EST, 12 April 2010

Apple's new iPad is released here at the end of the month. But will it prove a success and how exactly does it work?

Gadget: The iPad has proved popular in the US but gremlins have emerged

Harry Mount reviews the new gadget set to revolutionise computing.

Less is more — those were the Apple watchwords when it came to its last technological triumphs, the iPod and the iPhone.

Small, sleek, with as few buttons as possible, and so ultra-simple to use; that is why it is Apple's earphones that are permanently plugged into tens of millions of teenage ears; and Apple's phone keyboards that hundreds of millions of nimble fingers are jabbing away at 24 hours a day.

That's why Apple is the largest mobile device company in the world.

And now the Californian computer giant is trying to bump off its laptop maker rivals with the iPad, its compact computer launched last week in the US, to mixed results.

More than 300,000 were sold in the US on the day the so-called laptop killer was released; more than a million apps — or computer applications — were uploaded, and a quarter of a million ebooks were bought to read on the screens of these snazzy new iPad gadgets.

But thousands complained that the battery didn't charge properly and that it wouldn't pick up a wireless signal.

Will the iPad conquer Britain, then, when it's released here at the end of the month? Not to the same degree as the hugely successful iPod and the iPhone, I think, after testing one this week.

The iPod revolutionised the way we listened to music — with its tiny player, slimmer than a cigarette. The iPhone meant the modern media obsessive could carry around fewer objects than he used to, and wrap them into one magically small device.

The iPad doesn't replace anything; some critics have called it an iPhone that's too big. In fact, there's a lot it can't do.

It has a limited capacity for writing documents, it can't multitask and, without special Flash technology, it can't run some videos.

The virtual keyboard — which pops up on screen, saving extra bulk — is slightly squashed and, if anything, too sensitive.

A touch-typer like me finds his fingers hovering over the keys and typing the wrong letter by mistake with the tiniest quiver of a shaky little finger.

And, even at a reasonable £326 (the UK price is yet to be announced), the iPad is more expensive than laptops, which also have a DVD drive, a camera and a proper keyboard.

Another real shortcoming is that you can't use the iPad with an ordinary cable internet connection. If you're plugged into the internet at home, but don't have a wireless connection, then you're stuffed.

I had to go over to my sister's kitchen to watch Amy Winehouse sing Valerie on YouTube.

But that may just be an English problem. Big chunks of the US are becoming wi-fi zones. Eventually, where the US leads Britain will follow. And a 3G version of the iPad, to be released in the US next month, will allow you to get the internet via mobile phone networks.

And yet, for all these faults, I found myself warming to the iPad. Those sleek, minimalist Apple design signatures that we adored in the iPod are there in the iPad, and they are tremendously seductive.

Just opening the simple white packaging is a pleasure. No spaghetti of wires, no hefty Gutenberg bible of an instruction manual.

There's just the black tablet (a singleblock computer, without an unfolding keyboard), about the size of a hardback, weighing 1.5lb, a connection cable, and a single-page leaflet directing you to instructions on the internet.

Revolutionary: Steve Jobs of Apple launches the new iPad

The computer has four buttons: an on-off switch; a volume toggle; a screen lock; and a button that takes you back to your home page.

Once I'd set up the computer in half an hour, I didn't need to consult the instructions again. The design is so beautifully calibrated to the human mind and hand (apart from the dodgy keyboard) that it comes naturally.

See something you like the look of, and with the lightest tap of your fingertip there it is. Tilt it to one side, and the screen reads your mind, flipping seamlessly from portrait to landscape mode.

Want to turn a page? Flick the bottom right corner of the page with your index finger, and there you are. Within seconds, you find yourself sliding and stroking the screen, pinching and tweaking, intuitively getting to and through your books, games and songs with ease.

The iPad may not have new tricks that previous computers didn't have. But what it does do, it does immensely well.

It is lightning quick to upload pages from the internet. You get none of that irritation that comes exclusively with computers — I call it digitation — that comes when you're waiting for that horrible hourglass to disappear.

The iPad will end up being the dream surfing machine, if not one for writing long documents on — I'm writing this article on my old cheapo Dell instead.

With its decent-sized screen, crisp definition and speed, the iPad will be perfect for photos, videos, books, magazines, newspapers and music, along with email, web-surfing and a little light note-taking.

I watched some vintage footage on YouTube (which has its own pre-allocated page) of Elvis Presley and it came up as crisply as a Seventies amateur recording could.

A more recent clip, of David Cameron telling me how important this election is, came through as sharply as it would on a good television. By the beginning of next month, prepare yourself for zonked-out teenagers tapping away at Facebook on their iPads in the Quiet Zone of the 3.30 to Waterloo; next door to them, commuters will be downloading their iBooks.

THE old complaint about electronic books — that you can't drop them in the bath and hope to find out what happens in the next chapter — is still true with the iPad.

But, despite the iPad's anorexic profile, it has a nice robust quality to it, with no extruding twiddly bits for your two-year-old to snap off.

You inevitably get the odd splodgy fingermark on screen where you've done all that pecking and prodding. But you get the feeling you could toss it on to the back seat of the car from the driver's seat and it would be none the worse for it.

The iPad is, in short, a limited computer tucked into a design classic of a wrapper. And that's something for us to be proud of.

Steve Jobs, the US chief of Apple, has driven the computer side of the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. But the designer of all these devices is a 43-year-old Englishman called Jonathan Ive.

Forget the Queen or Gordon Brown; the most influential living Briton is this Chingford-born graduate of Newcastle Polytechnic, the man who has done most to design the way we live now, the internationally-acknowledged master of the electronic icon — or should that be iCon...