

Walt Mossberg's Apple iPad Review - mshafrir
http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20100331/apple-ipad-review/

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hexley
In Walt's review he says Safari has no tabs, but the iPad guide videos shows
an Exposé style tab feature. Obviously he missed that bit.

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reneky
Isn't that just windows?

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scottjackson
I believe the canonical term for them is "pages" (when you tap and hold a link
in Safari, one of the options is "Open in New Page").

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aresant
The functionality of the touch-keyboard has been my #1 concern in ordering an
iPad - his comments:

"I found email easy and productive to use, and had no trouble typing
accurately and quickly on the iPad’s wide on-screen keyboard. In fact, I found
the iPad virtual keyboard more comfortable and accurate to use than the
cramped keyboards and touchpads on many netbooks. . ."

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vegashacker
I hope Walt's right, but I just find that so hard to believe. Did you see
Steve typing an email at the iPad keynote? It was so awkward that it was kind
of painful to watch. And, as I recall, Steve even had an uncorrected typo slip
by in the one-line email that he composed.

That said, watching Walt's video got me super excited about getting one of
these puppies. :)

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blehn
_I hope Walt's right, but I just find that so hard to believe._

I agree. The benefit of being able to rest one's fingers on a physical
keyboard and feel each key seems rather obvious to me. Moreover, I doubt the
iPad virtual keyboard is any less cramped than a netbook keyboard.

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jsz0
I'm not expecting it to be anywhere near a real physical keyboard in terms of
speed but one of the interesting things about adapting to the iPhone keyboard
is accepting accuracy isn't all that important. It decodes my crazy gibberish
into the correct words most of the time. The trick of auto-correction is it
punishes you for stopping to correct typos. It rewards you for completing your
gibberish word. I would guess the process of tapping out the rest of the word
is where all the computational multi-touch magic is happening to make a good
auto-correct judgement. For speed the auto-suggest feature is also very
effective. If I only have to type "qu" to make the word "question" that's 3
screen taps versus the potential for at least 8 key presses on a physical
keyboard. Another side effect of mastering multi-touch typing is learning the
value of brevity. Obviously this post is not typed on an iPhone. You learn to
compose text in a straight forward way and do more of the compositional
process in your head before you start typing. In this way it reminds me of
writing short notes. So multi-touch keyboards won't replace physical keyboards
but I really believe they are good enough and perhaps even better than a real
keyboard sometimes. For example, if you are spelling challenged you're
probably familiar with the _type, type, type, mouse - click - click - correct,
type type type_ proces. On a multi-touch keyboard it either fixes your
spelling as you go or you tap once to auto-correct as you type. That's
actually a more intuitive process.

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blehn
Good points. The predictive text on the iPhone is excellent. It definitely
requires a lot of trust from the user, and I think it takes a while to build
up that trust. Even after a couple years, I find that I still need to make a
conscious effort to let the iPhone handle my mistakes.

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jamesk2
Walt's iPad review video is in Flash. Slightly ironic but the bigger question
is what is Apple doing about so much video content being in Flash? It's an
issue for many.

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protomyth
If you go there with an iPhone or iPad (on simulator), then it plays in
quicktime.

