I’ve had the iPad now for 24 hours so I thought I’d write up my first impression.   I’m no longer the Apple fan boy that I once was.   I’m a bit more cynical about Apple these days so when I purchased my iPad I did it with eyes wide open.  I opted for the cheapest model available which is the 16GB version without 3G.

Out of the box the iPad feels very nice to hold.   It’s got a pleasant heft to it and feels very solid.  The weight feels very evenly distributed so it is easy to hold no matter what orientation.  Upon opening the box you’ll find the iPad, a standard iPod cable, and a wall charger.   There are no headphones included which was a bit of a disappointment for me.

The iPad came fully charged which was a nice touch, however in order to begin using it you must connect it to iTunes.   While Apple offered to do this in the store for me I declined and activated it when I got home.   This step seems a bit strange to me since there is no mobile phone service to activate.   I understand the rationale for the iPhone but I don’t see the need for the iPad.

After plugging the iPad into my computer for it to activate with iTunes the first thing that caught my attention is that in the upper right hand corner of the screen where the battery indicator is at said “Not charging”.   It turns out that there is an issue with the charging capability of the iPad currently and it can only be charged with a Mac computer or the included wall charger.   My Dell desktop apparently was insufficient to give this thing juice.   Curious, I took my iPad out to the car and plugged it in to see how it would behave in the car.   Sure enough, no charge love there either.    I expect this to be fairly inconvenient if not fixed soon.   I charge my phone almost exclusively at my desk and in the car.   I can get a sync and a charge at the same time this way.

I brought the iPad back inside and hooked it up to my PC again to let it sync with iTunes.  You have all the same sync capabilities as the iPhone so I won’t cover that in detail.   Given that I only purchased the 16GB version it filled up very fast.    The sync copied over most of my iPhone apps so my first experience  with 3rd party apps were the upscaled iPhone ones.

After the sync I opened up Facebook for iPhone to see how it worked.  It’s great that the iPad can use iPhone apps but in reality I can’t say that I would really want to.   For example take a look at this screenshot of Facebook scaled up to the “2x” mode.  As you can see the text becomes very grainy and it just looks plain awful.

In comparison I downloaded the latest version of NetNewsWire from NewsGator which is an iPad native application and it looks simply stunning (notice the “Not Charging” in the upper right).

There are a number of great apps similar to NetNewsWire that were available at lunch.   The much anticipated Netflix is probably my favorite.   I was able to stream a movie live from Netflix without any hiccups over my wifi.   It was a very enjoyable experience to watch a movie this way and I’m looking forward to using that extensively on my many work trips in the hotel.

I was a bit surprised that Apple has cut out some of the applications that ship with the iPad compared to the iPhone.   The stocks, weather, calculator, and voice memo applications are all suspiciously missing.

Purchasing content with the app store is just as easy on the iPhone.   The cost of applications seems to have gone up dramatically.   Many apps are looking at $9.99 price tags which seems a bit high to me.   I’m sure the market will adjust as both more applications and iPads are on the market.

Reading books via iBook is very pleasant.   I’m particularly impressed with the page turn effect.   I know it’s just eye candy but I still love it.  I previously owned a kindle so I’m hopeful that Amazon will release a kindle application (and that Apple doesn’t block it) similar to the one they have for iPhone.    I have a several titles I’ve already purchased in the Amazon store and I’d hate to not be able to access those on the iPad.

The last comment I’ll make is that 16GB is surprisingly little.  When I opted for the small version I didn’t really expect to load it down with media.   I expected that most of the time I would be using Pandora/Netflix for movies and music so storage wouldn’t be an issue.   It turns out many of the iPad applications are surprisingly large.   For example the “Real Racing HD” game comes in at a whopping 171 MB.