Watching a video on the iPad is really nice - great clear, colorful HD screen - with one exception: the glare. I watched a
handbraked episode of Stargate Universe, as well as Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution and an episode of Modern Family via the ABC Player iPad application.
Overall, the apps for the iPad - ones designed to take advantage of the larger screen - are wonderfully useful.
Specific iPad applications
The Yahoo! Entertainment app is much more useful than the web version. It's too bad neither TiVo or MSN have iPad formatted apps like this. Customizing TV listings is very intuitive, poking at on/off choices with a finger is even more intuitive than pointing and clicking with a mouse.
The NPR app is fun, too, with streaming access to affiliates as well as a triple stacked stacked news story layout.
The Yahoo! Entertainment app crashed a few times, as did the NPR app, returning to the home screen.
The IMDB application was really fun. The wife and I sat around looking up movies and reading trivia and being silly running lines from The Karate Kid and Office Space. All on the couch, without a keyboard. That part truly shows off how the same data, different interface and in a movie-watching setting (couch) really can make the power of the internets click. I understand why Steve says it's a magical device.
ABC Player is fantastic, access to watch shows on demand is reminiscent of Hulu. I have to say that I was right on the edge of buying an iPad and the Modern Family episode featuring it had a little bit to contribute to pushing me over. ABC being owned by Disney with Steve Jobs as a 7% shareholder probably had a something to do with that.
Cool Hunting and Gilt's apps are also really great; easy browsing of the articles and items to buy are formatted to take advantage of the screen and input style. Here, also, Gilt's application has crashed once or twice on me.
With the larger storage space (I got the 32gb model), I think what might be an issue soon is more organization for certain applications. It sure is nice to have space for a lot of music, but music doesn't need screen size as the successful iPod line can attest - videos and pictures do. And both videos and pictures need some level of organization and categorization. On iTunes, on the desktop, I can only select a single level of folders for photos, whereas on the iPad, it has a more sophisticated level of organization: all thumbnails, or view by date or view by location. This is clever and pleasing. With videos, it's just by all thumbnails and once people gear up and buy tv shows and movies via iTunes, some better level of organization will be needed.
Some Technical Thoughts
Using the various applications on the iPad makes me think of the early days of the World Wide Web when various different browsers were coming out and HTML implementations were fragmenting and CSS was implemented spottily. The big angst and handwringing was about having to design a website multiple times just to cover all the browsers that were out there. It's clear that there's a divide between web browsers made for desktop and laptop devices (15"+ lcds, but more likely 19"+) and handheld/phone devices (3.7" screens or so) - things that fit in your pocket. The iPad is a new class of device - can't fit it in your pocket, but you don't want it to be a traditional computer - at about 9.5". This is the size of the "netbook" which hasn't really caused any inspiration at all, except maybe in the NGO sector as cheap laptops for the developing world (see XO, etc.)
The varying interfaces are also of concern. Right now, there're very few (free) iPad formatted apps. That, of course, will change. When Flash rose to prominence (and even now) the
Another thought comes to mind with Windows 7 Phone Series - Microsoft's touting that you can write Silverlight (browser-based) or XNA (XBox 360) applications and have them run on WinMo7 devices. This hearkens back to the horrible fail of Sun's tagline for Java "write once, deploy anywhere." No one will want to run the same silverlight browser-based application (19"+ screen) or XBox game in the same format as a mobile device (3.7" screen). They're two different types of media.
I took a peek at some of the crash logs and most of them appear to be Y! Entertainment out of memory ones and one Mobile Safari one.
Accessories
Seems like there're more accessories to shake a stick at yet, never the right ones. In particular, there needs to be an unobtrusive and heavy stand that can hold the 1.5 lb iPad in landscape and, most importantly, the angled, top heavy portrait mode. An ideal stand height would be about the height of the iPad's bezel, and black in color. I'm temporarily using the WD TV stand I have and it's too light (can't hold the iPad in portrait mode) and too high (about twice the height of the iPad bezel), but it's functional.
I'd also like to see more clamp-type accessories so I can have the iPad at various angles in various places.