It’s been a bit over three weeks since the iPadlaunched, and the hype has quieted somewhat. We’ve all seen the reviews that came out right around launch and we’ve heard all the arguments both for and against Apple’s tablet device.

It’s also been exactly three weeks since I bought an iPad and I thought this would be a good time to share my experience with it. This isn’t an objective review; this is just me sharing my personal experiences with a new device. Before launch a lot of people wondered what the iPad was for, and this is my answer. This is what the iPad is used for in our house.

First a quick bit of background information on me. I primarily use Windows 7 (a desktop machine) at home and OS X (on a MacBook Pro) at work. I own a netbook (running Windows 7) that converts into a tablet. My phone is a Motorola Droid. The iPad was my first real experience with Apple’s App Store, though I am of course familiar with the Android Market. I’ve been attracted to the tablet form factor for a while now, but the netbook makes a lousy tablet. It’s too thick, too slow, and the screen needs constant calibrating. Just not a pleasant experience.

Now I’m going to confess something to you. When I got caught up in the hype and purchased my iPad, there was a little voice in the back of my head telling me it was a huge mistake; that it’d be something I’d use for a few days and then get tired of. That I was signing up for a heaping helping of Buyer’s Remorse.

That little voice was wrong (so far). I use the iPad constantly. In fact, it only took a few days for my girlfriend and I to realize sharing an iPad wasn’t going to work, so we’re now a two iPad household.

Let’s start with the problems I’ve encountered. My biggest gripe by far is the lack of Flash; it can be a real pain sometimes when surfing the web. What’s most frustrating is knowing that Apple doesn’t care that its customers are experiencing this frustration and that this particular problem will never be fixed.

Next, if you want to get work done, be warned: the iPad isn’t an office tool (in my opinion, I know others feel differently). I do take mine to the office, but mostly to carry my music on, and to use during my lunch hour. Generally speaking, the iPad is a home (and maybe coffee shop) device. It’s a bit too big to carry around with me all the time. When it comes to getting work done, I’m firmly in the “a laptop or netbook can do everything the iPad can do, only better” camp. Sure, you can plug the iPad into the Keyboard Dock, buy a Bluetooth keyboard (or apparently use the Camera Connection Kit to connect a USB keyboard) but why would you bother with all that when a laptop performs better for doing tasks that require lots of text entry or multiple windows/programs open?

Then there’s the issue of accessories. A naked iPad feels slippery to me; I feel like some kind of case is a must. I have the official Apple case, which is horribly over-priced but wonderfully versatile. The flip cover protects the screen when I jam the iPad into my laptop bag or toss it onto the back seat of my car, and that same flip cover folds back and into a slot to form a wedge-shaped stand that can hold the iPad vertical for watching videos or at a gentle angle for interacting with the device. My girlfriend has a silicone sleeve for hers (the Apple case has become really hard to find); it offers no protection for the screen but the back has a couple of ridges that offer a very secure grip on the iPad.

We bought two of the Apple docks and have never used them; they were a complete waste of money for us. You have to take the iPad out of whatever case you have it in in order to use the dock, and that’s a pain in the neck. A Lego iPad stand would be of more use than the Apple dock. Chargers are over-priced, but at least you can use the iPhone/iPod cables you might already own.

Speaking of charging, let’s talk about the battery. There’s been a lot of complaining about the device not charging on a USB port. It will charge, slowly, once the unit goes to sleep, but realistically plugging it into a wall socket is the most efficient way to charge an iPad. What the complainers don’t tell you, though, is that an iPad will run all day on a single charge. Yes, the battery life is 10 hours but in real-world terms I’ve never run out of a charge over the course of a day. I just plug it in when I go to bed; the charging situation isn’t the problem nay-sayers want to make it.

So the iPad isn’t an office tool; what is it then? I’d call it an entertainment device, I guess. It’s the web at your fingertips in a screen large enough to make reading websites comfortable. Our iPads are always nearby. My girlfriend is one of these crafty types and she’ll often have her iPad beside her while she’s making things, using it to look up bits of info she might need or to take short notes on. There’s always an iPad at hand while we’re watching TV, in case we need to look up something on IMDB or Wikipedia. We’ve used them in the kitchen for checking out new recipes. Basically we carry them around the house constantly.

So it’s great for surfing the web. It’s also a great ebook reader. I can’t compare it to an e-ink device because I’ve never used one of those for any serious length of time. But despite the fact that people insist a back-lit screen hurts your eyes, I haven’t found that to be the case at all. My eyes aren’t as young as they used to be and by bumping up the font size and turning the brightness down, I can read more comfortably than I’ve been able to in years (yes, more comfortably than I read print books). I find the iPad’s screen is much more comfortable to read off of then either my laptop screens or the LCD on my desktop. It’s a beautiful screen (but a smudge magnet; I bought a packet of 12 lint-free cloths for $5 and they do a great job of keeping the screen clear).

We watch a lot of video on our iPads. We’ve got a Netflix account, and I’m fairly hooked on the ABC.com app. If we’re both going to watch the same show, we still plunk ourselves down on the couch in front of the big-screen, but the iPad makes a very nice “personal television.” Plug headphones in and she can watch “Walking With Dinosaurs” (she’s such a nerd) while I’m reading or watching something completely different.

And there’s the app store, of course. I spend way too much time downloading various apps. I find I purchase a lot more from the App Store apps than I do from the Android Market, and I think a lot of that has to do with the size of the iPad. I’ve got a few sketch applications which prove once again I have no talent for drawing. A few music making applications which remind me that I should’ve been a rock star. And of course more games than I really have time to play.

So there’s a lot I do with my iPad and that’s what makes it so useful. After a long day I can flop down on the couch and, on one device, play a game, then watch some TV, then read a book, then plink out some tunes on an electronic keyboard, then look up a tutorial for playing the keyboard, then check to see what’s happening on Twitter and catch up on my RSS feeds. Yes, you can do all of this with a netbook; I’ve done all of this with a netbook. But the ergonomics are completely different with the iPad. It doesn’t feel like a computer because it isn’t a computer. It feels like…well my apologies for sounding cheesy but if feels like something out of science fiction at times. It feels like I’m holding The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer from Neil Stephenson’sThe Diamond Age.

Now, that all said, a lot of what I love about the iPad comes from it’s shape. I’m still not a fan of Apple’s “Walled Garden” and benevolent (?) dictatorship. I’m still really hoping that one of the upcoming Android tablets is as fast and ergonomic and beautiful as the iPad, and that the Android Market catches up to Apple’s App Store. I’ll switch in a heartbeat if that comes to pass.

But for now, there’s literally nothing like the iPad on the market, and I haven’t had an instant of that Buyer’s Remorse I was worried about. It “feels” like a unique product and I think it’ll be best appreciated by people who find joy in using technology. The iPad is a fun device and not something you’ll need at the office. The smart money is still on waiting for a second generation, or a similar Android device, but I’m not getting any younger and I’ve been waiting for a tablet like this since my days watching Star Trek.

No regrets, at least so far. We’ll see how the hardware holds up over time, and how much remorse I feel when a better, cheaper tablet hits the market.

Last week, anyone who pre-ordered Apple’s iPad Camera Connection Kit began receiving the iPad accessory. The kit–which features one dock-connector adapter with an SD-card slot and a second one with a USB port–is designed to let you transfer your digital camera’s photos to your iPad. But it turns out this accessory has a few other tricks up its metaphorical sleeve that just may make it more appealing to many iPad owners. None of this functionality is officially supported–at least not yet–so caveat emptor if you’re thinking of buying the Kit just to get one or more of these features.

Audio: As Macworld contributor Glenn Fleishman first reported, standard USB-audio accessories–namely, USB headphones, headsets, and speakers–can be used with the iPad via the Camera Connection Kit’s USB adapter. When you plug one of these audio accessories into the adapter’s USB port, all audio is routed through the USB-audio accessory. If you’re using a USB headset, the headset’s microphone also works for audio-recording apps, as well as audio-chat apps such as Skype.

While I didn’t have enough USB headphones, headsets, and speakers on hand to test this feature exhaustively, my results with a handful of devices confirm Glenn’s experiences. In fact, the iPad treats a connected USB-audio accessory much like a set of headphones connected to the iPad’s headphone jack: If you unplug the USB cable or adapter while music is playing via the iPod app, playback pauses. On the other hand, I did occasionally experience some odd echo-like distortion when using a USB headset.

Keyboards: The iPad is the first iPhone OS device to support external keyboards, but that support is officially limited to Bluetooth keyboards and Apple’s iPad Keyboard Dock. After seeing Glenn’s original article, I decided to plug in a bunch of other USB devices. While hard drives didn’t work, some keyboards did.

Why only some? USB keyboards that provide higher-power USB ports for charging and syncing iPods and iPhones–including Apple’s own aluminum models–require more power than the iPad’s dock-connector port will provide. If you connect one of these keyboards to the Camera Connection Kit’s USB adapter, you get an error message (see the image to the right) that the accessory is unavailable because it uses too much power.

If you connect a more miserly USB keyboard, however, the message you see states only that the attached USB device is not supported. Once you dismiss that error message, the keyboard functions much as any third-party Bluetooth keyboard: all standard keys work as expected, as do the volume and mute keys; the eject button toggles the iPad’s onscreen keyboard. (See my article on the Keyboard Dock and Bluetooth keyboards for more details on how third-party keyboards function with the iPad.) We tested several third-party keyboards, including models from Matias and MacAlly, and they worked well. Logitech’s Windows-focusedIlluminated Keyboard, on the other hand, didn’t work, likely because the keyboard draws additional power to provide backlighting for its keys.

The question comes to mind following some comments by Winfrey–a prominent past booster of Amazon’s Kindle–during a short segment of her influential TV show last week that featured tech analyst Omar Wasow and the Apple iPad.

Winfrey gushed about the “amazing” new device, which she said she got the day of its launch. One reason is that “books move,” she said, as she demoed how the iBooks app (featuring the Oprah Book Club) keeps e-books on a virtual shelf and how some books can feature interactive elements. “It’s going to change the way kids learn,” she said.

She also said that she loved the iPad because it is back-lit, which makes the screen good for sharing digital photos and playing games like Scrabble. “Gosh, those Apple folks,” she said.

Winfrey never said explicitly whether she was now doing all her reading on the iPad. And, in one positive note for Amazon, she noted that viewers could use an iPad to read Kindle e-books. On the other hand, she also used the past tense in the context of her ownership of a Kindle.

As she put it, “there’s a Kindle app so that those of you have Kindles–obviously I had a Kindle–you can take all the books from your Kindle and put them on your iPad.”

A spokesman for the Oprah show says Winfrey uses both devices.

Winfrey’s iPad enthusiasm matters because she is a tastemaker among legions of book buyers. After she endorsed the Kindle in the fall of 2008, Amazon was flooded with so many orders, it had difficulty keeping up with demand for the device over the holidays.

Amazon has made it clear that its sees the proliferation of Internet-connected gadgets–even ones that compete with its own Kindle device–as an opportunity. In an earnings call last week, Amazon’s CFO Tom Szkutak said that Amazon benefits from any device that could give people access to its giant online store.

“What we are excited about is that world may shift to a place where everybody has a 3G connected device for browsing the Web,” he said.

Apple recently delayed the iPad’s international launch after huge demand in the United States caught the maker of trendy iPhones and MacBooks off guard. But Chinese consumers looking for knock-offs of the company’s latest must-have product need look no further than this teeming electronics mall in Shenzhen, the southern Chinese boomtown near the border with Hong Kong.

Here, tiny shops are stuffed with pirated versions of everything: from Microsoft’s newest Windows 7 operating system, a steal at $2 each, to a range of Apple products, from iPhones to MacBooks and the lightweight MacBook Air.

After extensive queries with multiple shopkeepers, one surnamed Lin offered the sought-after item in a dark backroom on the market’s fifth floor away from the hustle and bustle.

Hefty and thickset with three USB ports and a more rectangular shape than the original, this knock-off with iPad aspirations, which runs a Windows operating system, looks more like a giant iPhone. It costs 2,800 yuan ($410), making it slightly cheaper than the iPad’s $499-$699 price tag.

“This is just the first rough version,” says Lin a crew-cut agent speaking in bursts of quick-fire Cantonese.

“While the shape isn’t quite the same, the external appearance is very similar to the iPad, so we don’t think it will affect our sales that much,” he added, explaining the difference was due to the difficulty sourcing matching parts because of the quick two-month turnaround time for the first version’s development.

Hard-working Chinese bootleggers are rushing to fill a vacuum that won’t last for long, created by unexpectedly strong demand for the iPad in its first weeks on the market.

The 10-inch entertainment device, on which one can read books, play music and videos and surf the Internet, sold more than 500,000 in its first week alone, and continued strong U.S. demand has led Apple to delay the product’s international launch to the end of April.

Chinese counterfeiters have rushed to fill the iPad gap.

Taobao, China’s largest online marketplace, contains hundreds of listings for the coveted product, many real but some dubiously labeled as “China goods,” with claims to have even better features than the real deal.

Like the models in the Shenzhen market, these fake iPads also retail for around 2800 yuan each, compared with 4,000-6,000 yuan for those marketed as real.

Analysts and gadget fanatics expect the iPad to do well in Asia given Apple’s strong branding and the rising number of affluent middle class consumers. But few are surprised by the quick appearance of a counterfeit version in a country where pirated movies often appear in markets in the same week of their theatrical release.

“China is basically a market that has the ability to clone everything, so it’s really not surprising,” said Edward Yu, chief executive of Beijing-based researcher Analysys International.

“I don’t think piracy is a bad thing for the iPad given that China has a huge population, maybe the clone iPads will give more of the potential users a look and feel.”

Back in Shenzhen, Lin said factories around China’s Pearl River Delta — the country’s biggest export manufacturing hub — were working hard on an updated version of the pirated iPads to feed strong demand.

“This is just the first rough version,” Lin said. “Eventually, the factories will be able to make a much better copy.”

Now that the iPad has been released, there are three kinds of apps in the AppStore: apps made specifically for the iPhone, apps made specifically for the iPad, and “hybrid” apps that include both iPhone- and iPad-optimized interfaces.

The problem is that while the iTunes Store provides a convenient button for browsing either just iPhone or just iPad apps, the rest of iTunes appears to be ignorant of this distinction. The Apps view, listing all downloaded apps, doesn’t differentiate by default, and when your iPad is connected, the Apps tab for your iPad provides no way to view just the iPad apps.

There are a couple ways to ferret out your iPad and hybrid apps, however. Click on the Apps item in iTunes’s sidebar–your iPad doesn’t need to be connected–to view all downloaded apps. Then choose View -> As List to view those apps in a sortable text list. Next choose View -> View Options and check the box next to Kind (or right-click any column header in the Apps view and choose Kind to enable it); this action adds the Kind column to the list.

Click this new Kind column and your apps are now sorted by app type: iPad app, iPhone/iPod touch app, or iPhone/iPod touch/iPad app (click again to invert the sort order). Unfortunately, iPhone/iPod touch apps end up betweenthe two types of iPad-optimized apps, so it’s a bit of a hassle to view all apps with an iPad interface. But it’s better than nothing, right?

The other way to view apps in such groups is to choose View -> as Grid and then choose View -> Grid View -> Applications. This shows you a graphical view of all your downloaded apps, grouped by app type. I don’t find grid view to be as useful as list view, however, especially if you have lots of apps. (It also sorts the same way as list view, with iPhone/iPod touch apps between the two types of iPad apps.)

Of course, these options don’t help you while you’re deciding exactly which apps to sync to your iPad (in other words, when you select your iPad in the sidebar and view the Apps tab). But it at least makes it easier to see how many of your apps will take advantage of the iPad’s larger screen and other unique features. Here’s hoping Apple fixes this omission, and makes it easier to automatically sync just iPad-optimized apps to your iPad, in an update to iTunes.

Virginia Campbell, from Lake Oswego, Oregon, is a 99-year old woman who loves to read and write. Unfortunately, an aggravating eye disease (glaucoma) has prevented her from doing so with ease lately. Now, on the heels of her 100th anniversary, Campbell has been introduced to the Apple iPad, which allows her to effortlessly adjust text size for reading, and use the large virtual keyboard for writing.

Campbell graduated from Reed College in the early 1930s with a bachelor’s in English literature, and is a widow of former Lake Oswego Mayor C. Herald Campbell. The Apple gadget has “changed her life,” Ginny Adelsheim, one of her daughters, reportedly said. She cited the iPad’s ability to manipulate the way how text is viewed as the winning feature. “She’s writing all of her poetry on her iPad now,” Ginny told The Oregonian. “Her handwriting is so scratchy. It’s so much easier because she can actually read it. Others can read it, too.”

The iPad not only offers the ability to increase or decrease text size, but also to choose different kinds of fonts, making it easier and more pleasant to read on the 9.7-inch Multi-Touch display with IPS technology.
“The thing that’s so neat is there’s nothing between you and the screen,” Adelsheim said. “You can enlarge the print, and it has a much brighter screen so you can read on it more easily than with a regular computer screen.”

Virginia Campbell never owned a computer, but the Apple iPad hype got the best of her, according to the paper. To grant her wish, her daughter Corinna Campbell-Sack and son-in-law, Bob Sack, went and stood in line on launch day. Campbell has been using the device ever since. Moreover, Apple’s methods of putting technology into the hands of everyone, young and old, has prompted Campbell to write a tribute to the iPad.

“To this technology-ninny it’s clear,In my compromised 100th year,That to read and to writeAre again within sightOf this Apple iPad pioneer.”

Scammers are distributing e-mails designed to trick iPad owners into downloading software that they think is an iTunes update, but which turns out to be malware that opens a back door on the computer, researchers warned on Monday.

The e-mails have a subject line that says “iPad Software Update” and offer a link to a Web page that looks like a legitimate iTunes download page, according to BitDefender. Instead, the link installs malware identified as Backdoor.Bifrose.AADY, according to the BitDefender blog.

The malware injects itself in to the “explorer.exe” process and opens up a back door that attackers can use to take control of the system whenever they want, the post said. It also attempts to read the keys and serial numbers of the various software programs installed on the computer and logs passwords to the victim’s ICQ, Messenger, and POP3 mail accounts, and protected storage, BitDefender said.

Mac users are not affected by this piece of malware, according to the post.