The iPad: An Infuriating Appreciation

Dec. 23, 2010— -- Four months into my iPad odyssey, I'm bewitched, bothered and bewildered by this wonderful, ground-breaking, infuriating tablet computer.

What the iPad does it does so well that it almost seems churlish to complain about its shortcomings. The battery of this $499 device consistently runs 10 hours without a charge and it fires up in less than a minute. It's lightweight at 1.5 pounds, ridiculously easy to use and able to do just about everything a full-blown laptop can do, with some key limitations.

I love the way it displays pages, immediately adapting the view to whichever way I hold the device. The iPad never gets hot, always calls up apps and turns Web pages with no hesitation or annoying PC-like behavior such as hour-glassing or freezing.

Apps are easy to load from the Apple store and many of the thousands available are free. I happily canceled my dead-tree newspaper and several magazines to view publications entirely on my iPad. Viewing story pages on the iPad may be just as good and a lot handier than a paper page, although publishing apps can be quirky on the iPad.

I've downloaded three successive versions of the New York Times app and all of them exhibit odd and unpredictable behavior. The latest NYT app, the best in terms of usability and readability, invariably loads with the last version I viewed, then abruptly quits. On restart, the pages are refreshed but the app will occasionally quit suddenly.

And so It goes for nearly all the several dozen publishing apps I've tried. They work amazingly well, but sometimes type is cut off, boxes are blanked out, links are dead. None of this makes any of the apps a bad experience - USA Today, NYT, WSJ and the New Yorker are some of my favorites - but it does detract from the experience. Appmakers are forever finetuning, so it pays to update your apps regularly.

Game apps, a few of which I've downloaded and many of which my teenage sons have added, work almost flawlessly. Maybe that's because game developers are used to sweating the details and publishers are used to, well, shoveling out words and not developing apps. And, of course, users tend to pay for games while most publishing apps are free.

Using the built-in Safari browser is when the going gets more bewildering than bewitching. Most sites aren't optimized for Apple or Safari, so you'll likely encounter a ticker-tape parade of blanks, no-loads and pages that don't look familiar. This is compounded by the hubris of Apple in deciding to spurn the Flash video technology that's used by thousands of sites in favor of HTML5, deployed by far fewer sites although that platform is growing.

On these pages, you'll see the "you must download Flash" error, except you can't because Apple won't let you.