Firstly, this is a stunning machine. The front, apart from the slightly sunken home button, is completely flush, the generous bevels at the side giving way to the much bigger than I’d expected screen. The back, curved and subtle and faced with a brushed steel look screams elegance, the only downer is the oversized Apple plonked in the centre. Regardless, this is design styling at its apex, a true thing of beauty and utterly gorgeous to gaze upon and hold, its weighty feel reassuringly heavy.
Whether customs or my father had opened the box I don’t know, but whilst that particular pleasure was denied to me, at least they hadn’t activated the machine and connected to iTunes between them, that part was still to be actioned. And so, carefully handling it out of the slightly torn box and after a brief coo at the thing as I tipped it around and examined the edges, I connected the little wire into the iPad and fired up iTunes, and waited for Windows to install the new gadget’s drivers.
I’m a fairly techy guy – my education might be outdated (hey, Pascal!) but I like to think I know what I’m doing with regards to laughing at Plug and Play (do Microsoft even still call it that?) – five minutes of dumbfounded frustration with the lack of communication betwixt laptop and iPad resulted in a few angry clicks and a little tug of the white wire before realising that the iPad needed to be active and alert or Windows would just think it wasn’t connected.
This, by the way, was after installing iTunes some time back. I’d grabbed the latest version in anticipation of my new arrival and faced the same issues as some other users were having with it – not being able to talk to the App Store and a frankly quite frightening ability to wreck certain pre-installed Windows libraries. Three re-installs of Quicktime appeared to do the trick, but it’s worth updating iTunes yourself before coming home from the Apple Store to save potential hair loss.
So, anyway, once everything was talking, I dragged over some music, synced my Google contacts and installed all the apps I’d been queuing since UPS let me know they’d picked up the parcel thousands of miles away (all credit to the courier, by the way, the time between initial pick-up and the drop-off was around 36 hours – I’m impressed). So, with a mug of Tesco’s finest (and oddly chocolatey) instant coffee and a few liquorice sweets to hand, it was time to Slide to Unlock. Let’s go.
