The first thing that hits you is the speed. I don’t know how an iPhone 3GS feels because I’ve never used one, but compared to an iPod Touch (and especially the 2G iPhone) this thing flies. From simple tasks like scrolling between home screens, to popping up settings menus and even launching applications, the iPad is the speediest thing I’ve ever used. Even rotating the screen, which the iPad does through all 360 degrees, is completely without lag or delay.
First impressions were great, then, and due to the fact that the iPad is heavily based off the iPhone’s UI I was right at home straight away, dragging icons around and populating my dock with the programs I thought I’d use the most – internet, email, contacts and the App Store, although you can add and remove at will. Once I’d shifted everything around I then starting dipping in and out of all the apps themselves, with essentially entirely positive results.
First things first – Safari. I’d set up the iPad’s wifi and connected it to my home network without any fuss at all, and then dived straight into the web browser. The app loaded instantly, and I’d got to the TheSixthAxis homepage within seconds – as you’d expect, of course, but what I didn’t expect was the incredible speed at which everything scrolled, zoomed and rotated. And I couldn’t get it to slow down no matter what I did or what page I decided to load.
Also impressive is the rendering. TSA’s home page isn’t particularly IE friendly, the various CSS3 functions providing rounded corners that I have no desire to reproduce as images and so it’s refreshing to see the page as intended on the iPad. 
The text was a little large (and so some of the boundaries weren’t working properly) but Webkit is more than up to the job and combined with the iPad’s vivid screen our website has never looked better. At least not to me.
This fluidity continues through to the Mail application, which had my TSA account and my Gmail up and running in a flash. Because of the iPad’s increased resolution (it’s running at 1024 x 768) there’s now room for side menus and a far more user friendly layout ethos that flows throughout, and Mail is a shining example of this with your inbox headers down the left and the message window on the right. Of course, this is all with the unit held horizontally, tip it 90 degrees and it looks like the image on the left – still neat, but less intuitive for me.
Either way, Mail is great, and can poll for new messages at regular intervals or you can opt to have it delivering your new email as it comes assuming the service you’re using supports push.
The other included apps will be familar to iPhone and iPod users, although all have been redesigned to make better use of the iPad’s pixel dimensions. The Calender is now fabulously well designed, similar in form and function to a ‘proper’ organiser and shares a few visual cues with the similarly updated Contacts app. Notes is still far too basic to be taken seriously but Maps (which supports wifi triangulation if you don’t have GPS) is staggeringly quick and the integrated Street Map is now a joy.
The iPod, Photos and YouTube apps have again all seen considerable tweaks since the iPhone, with album art now featuring more prominently, photos more beautifully presented and YouTube more suited to actually reflecting the uses of the actual website, with an ability to sign in, view subscriptions and stare at HD content like our very own TSAtv, which looks so sharp and detailed on the iPad’s screen – and of course, it’s all so slick and fast.
