Hands on with the iPad

The geeks at immedia invited a couple of the Durban twitterati over to their offices this afternoon to have a hands on peek with the new Apple iPad.

Kishyr & Annice from immedia flew over to New York this past weekend, and camped outside the Apple store, just to pick up their iPads, making them the first South Africans to own the iPad. When I popped around this evening to have a look, I have to admit I was seriously impressed with the device. When the iPad was launched, I was in 2 minds about it, but having played with it for half an hour, there is definitely a glimmer of hope.

The iPad specific developed apps that run on the iPad work quite well, and the Real Racing HD game ($9.99) is awesome to play. The graphics are insane, and the playability of the steering the pad to the left & right is amazing.

Another app that looked really cool was the Scrabble App ($9.99) and allows you to use your iPhone or iPod touch to see your tiles, which then you “throw” onto the Scrabble board on the iPad. We also got to see the Weather HD app, which shows you what the weather looks like in your city, with really cool looking clouds or wind etc. There were also a couple of other interesting apps, which we flipped through as well.

But, that said, the price of the apps is quite steep. Most games are going for around $9.99, while most of the other apps in the same sort of price range. Yes, you can run your iPhone apps on the iPad, but they definitely don’t look like they belong there. When you upscale to 2x, it looks rather out-of-place, and when it runs in 1x size, it just looks too small for the screen. The other bugbear that I found was the keyboard, and while I suppose it may take some getting used to, it may just take that little bit longer than what it took to get used to the iPhone keyboard.

Overall, I reckon it will be a winner, and with over 300,000 units sold on opening weekend, it looks like Apple have (another) winner. I just need to wait and see when I can get mine :) I am also looking at getting a review unit in the next couple of days, and then I will post a bit more info.