JT’s World

Here it is folks, the Apple iPad. The screen is gorgeous, tilting is responsive, and the thing is super thin. Still, if you’ve used the iPhone before — and you can see the two devices side-by-side here — there’s not a lot of surprises here so far. Here are some initial thoughts on the iPad:

• It’s not light. It feels pretty weighty in your hand.
• The screen is stunning, and it’s 1024 x 768. Feels just like a huge iPhone in your hands.
• The speed of the CPU is something to be marveled at. It is blazingly fast from what we can tell. Webpages loaded up super fast, and scrolling was without a hiccup. Moving into and out of apps was a breeze. Everything flew.
• There’s no multitasking at all. It’s a real disappointment. All this power and very little you can do with it at once. No multitasking means no streaming Pandora when you’re working in Pages… you can figure it out. It’s a real setback for this device.
• The ebook implementation is about as close as you can get to reading without a stack of bound paper in your hand. The visual stuff really helps flesh out the experience. It may be just for show, but it counts here.
• No camera. None, nada. Zip. No video conferencing here folks. Hell, it doesn’t have an SMS app!
• It’s running iPhone OS 3.2.
• The keyboard is good, not great. Not quite as responsive as it looked in the demos.
• No Flash confirmed. So Hulu is out for you, folks!

[via engadget]

Sure, it was fun to have Ballmer run us through a little demo of the new Zune HD, but we’d be remiss in our duties if we didn’t spend some time manhandling the device ourselves. We managed to track down the beast and toy with it a bit, and we must say… the thing kind of rocks. In your hand the Zune HD has a nice, solid feel, with good heft to it and a surprisingly thin profile. The OLED screen looks absolutely stunning — even at severe viewing angles, colors were super bright, edges were crisp, and text looked beautiful. The UI is an extension of the existing Zune interface, but way tricked out in this version, with lots of flipping images, scaling text, smooth scrolling, and an extreme emphasis on simple visual navigation. While the OS isn’t finished, we didn’t notice a single hiccup while jumping through menus or playing back HD video. We’ll definitely have more on this in the near future, but for now, you’ll have to manage with this handful of images.