iPad after two days

I’m wrapping up two days with the iPad. Day one was getting used to the device and picking up some apps.

Apps
There isn’t a lot out there yet that is iPad optimized. I only found about a dozen apps I wanted to download and use… Amongst those:

• The requisite iWork suite (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote). I haven’t really used these much. They’ll probably get a lot more use this week.
• Wordpress. They did a great job getting this app together. I’m writing this blog post with it.
• Netflix. I’ve had too much fun things in real life happening to care about watching movies, but the tests of the netflix app are amazing. The video is clean and crisp. I can usually find a good movie to load within seconds and streaming begins immediately.
• Tweetdeck. This is the best Twitter client I’ve found. The default view is one’s mentions and timeline. It’s very well done.
• FlightTracker. Wonderful flight tracking app. Complete weather radar of the entire country and realtime monitoring of flights. Pretty slick.
• The Weather Channel (TWC Max+). Best weather app.
• ABC. Quality and speed were extremely impressive.
• iBooks. It’s the best ebook experience on the iPad. It comes with a free Winnie the pooh book. I didn’t read it yet… It was more fun to play with and scroll the virtual pages.
• Kindle. The UI isn’t quite as good as iBooks, but this doesn’t matter… My kindle purchases sync’d right up and the book I was reading in my iPhone even synced to the last page I was on. Really slick.
• Newspaper apps (nytimes, wsj, USA today, blah blah…). I wasn’t impressed. I found their web pages to be as good, or better, and without subscription requirements.

A lot of the popular apps on the iPhone are preferred over their mobile web counterpart simply because their web app counterpart sucks on a small screen (like Facebook). I don’t think a facebook app would be exciting on an iPad… The facebook web pages load flawlessly on the iPad. No need for an app. I think the same will be true for a lot of the other native web apps out there.

Keyboard
I mentioned yesterday that it was odd trying to touch type. The landscape keyboard is getting much easier to deal with. It’s actually getting pretty amazing. Where I preferred the portrait mode on my iPhone and nexusone, I can touch type in landscape on the iPad. Portrait mode works, but ends up just being a bunch of thumb pressing.

The virtual keypad compensates for mistypes most of the time. I can type at about 50-60 words per minute and not look at the keypad while typing. Not bad for day two! My native hardware speed is around 80-90.

Summary
Nothing major for new discoveries. Typing is rather nice and I hope I can reach my hardware typing speeds in another day or two. The apps released thus far, considering most developers never got to test on the iPad, are mostly impressive. Running iPhone apps on the iPad is mostly lame.