Now that we’ve had a few weeks to put the iPad through its paces, it’s moved from being a novel new gadget to something that I use every day. The number one question I get when people find out I have an iPad is – what do you actually use it for?

It’s difficult to describe to people why I’d choose an iPad over my MacBook Pro while around the house. The MacBook is easier to type on, it’s more powerful, and it comes with all the latest plug-ins/extensions to make for a pretty good experience, but it also weighs almost 10 pounds and the battery now lasts a measly couple hours on a good day.

After a few days, I found myself bringing the iPad all over the house. It’s so trivial just to pick it up and throw it on the couch, have it in front of you while you’re eating a meal, or watching a TV show or movie in bed.

So what am I actually using it for?

Reading

It’s been a few months since I started using Marco Arment’s Instapaper for iPhone. Since then, I’ve moved all my medium to long-form reading from my desktop to a mobile device. Simply put, reading while sitting at your desk sucks. I can never get comfortable, and it doesn’t lend itself well enough to a comfortable reading position.

Instapaper works by providing you with a simple ‘Read Later’ link you place in your browser’s bookmark bar. Whenever you come across something you’d rather not read, or a site so riddled with ads the content is hard to process, just click the link and off it goes to Instapaper. The next time you launch the app on your phone, you’re greeted with a highly readable, stripped back version of the articles you’ve saved.

It’s a glorious reading experience, not having to be distracted by navigation, advertisements, or other distractions, and the iPad makes it even better. The latest version received a spectacular visual refresh and now includes three of the new system fonts that are included on the iPhone: Hoefler, Baskerville and Palatino. I don’t have to say much more to those of you who are typography nerds, but to the rest of you: it looks damn good and I don’t think I’ll read any blog posts on my Mac again.

Gaming

Gaming on the iPad is still an evolving landscape. While Apple likes to heavily feature the driving games where you have to tilt the device to steer, what you’ll quickly realize is that this is a lousy way to control a game, and you’ll probably just end up with sore arms. Too many iPhone OS games seem to needlessly employ the accelerometer hoping that it will elevate the level of immersion a gamer experiences while playing, but more often than not it just acts as a frustrating barrier to being able to properly play the game.

The types of games that shine on the iPad are generally pretty casual, making use of clever gestural input with little-to-no instructions required. So far, the best of the bunch seem to be those that take advantage of the larger screen on the iPad to give the player a larger area to interact with, like Scrabble or Pinball.

Godfinger is one such game that really shines on the iPad. The mechanics of the game are nearly identical to Farmville, the Facebook-based farming game with a massive user-base. In Godfinger, you’re the All Powerful One, and you’re given a world to preside over with several followers. You can build up cash by having your followers farm for gold, but need to maintain their levels of happiness in doing so.

The graphics are beautiful, and it takes advantage of a few very simple gestures to interact with the world. The game will continue to run even after you’ve quit, and will send you push notifications if anything needs your attention. You can add other friends that are playing in-game and visit each others’ worlds to help out. You can also run it on the iPhone, playing with the same world you created on your iPad.

If it wasn’t already clear, I’ll warn you outright: this game is addictive. I’ve got countless friends and a some folks at T+L hooked on it, but it’s a great example of a simple game done right on this device.

Utilities

The iPad’s screen size gives designers the opportunity to develop some pretty information-dense applications. At over four times the pixel count as an iPhone, there’s a temptation to cram a lot more on the screen at a given time. However, just like the Web, the best experiences on the iPad seem to be from the apps that show restraint and care in their information design.

I get a lot of flack around the office for my purchase of the $0.99 Weather HD, the highly (and perhaps overly) visualized weather app, but it has become one of my most frequently used apps. Why? I could easily one of the many weather apps that provide the time for sunset, sundown, the atmospheric pressure, precipitation pattern and weather radar, but who really needs any of those things?

When I’m walking out the door in the morning, all I really care about is the day’s forecast, the temperature and maybe how windy it is. The designers of this app recognized that, and deliver this information in a beautiful, visually compelling way. It’s not for everyone, but I’d sooner buy an app that does something simple really well than one that tries to do everything and ends up delivering a mediocre experience.

What’s Next?

There’s still a lot of gaps in the iPad experience and a lack of high-quality, functional apps, but developers are surely working away as we speak on many of them. Most notably, Facebook is way late to the game in delivering an iPad-friendly application (usually being first to the plate on new devices). It’s going to be an exciting year for the iPad owners as many of these apps come to fruition, and just like the iPhone’s app ecosystem, it’s surely going to take some time to flourish.

Apple has just announced iAd, their new mobile advertising platform and needless to say, everyone here at Teehan+Lax is very very excited. Details are sparse at the moment, but Apple has described iAd as an intersection between Emotion + Interactivity… Which happens to be a fairly suitable description of Teehan+Lax as well.

Advertising on the iPhone was been atrocious at best, and it’s even worse on the iPad. Uninteresting, static and unemotional ads have littered the mobile experience, and Apple aims to change that with iAd. Ads served up will be HTML5 only (sorry, no Flash), but the platform appears to be incredibly flexible. Animation, video & rich interactions are all possible — this really gives new meaning to “microsite”.

The big selling feature for advertisers is having their experiences stay inside of the applications — consumers can dip into the ad to find out more, without leaving the application at all. My assumption is that iAds will take advantage of the newly announced multitasking features, which will essentially pause the app while you explore the ad.

They only demonstrated ads running on an iPhone, so I’m curious to see how they’ll be handled on an iPad… my assumption is that advertisers will need to develop platform-specific ads for trafficking. Regardless, judging from the ads that are currently being displayed within iPad apps, I think iAd’s will really shine here.

We’ll be discussing more as additional details become available. In the meantime, here’s what Apple has to say about it:

“Apple’s new mobile advertising platform, combines the emotion of TV ads with the interactivity of web ads. When users click on mobile ads they are almost always taken out of their app to a web browser, which loads the advertiser’s webpage. Users must then navigate back to their app, and it is often difficult or impossible to return to exactly where they left. iAd solves this problem by displaying full-screen video and interactive ad content without ever leaving the app, and letting users return to their app anytime they choose. iPhone OS 4 lets developers easily embed iAd opportunities within their apps, and the ads are dynamically and wirelessly delivered to the device. Apple will sell and serve the ads, and developers will receive 60 percent of iAd revenue.”

While Apple won’t be blessing Canada with the iPad until later this month, that hasn’t stopped some of us from crossing the border and heading directly to the nearest Apple Store. I didn’t take the road trip myself, however I was the beneficiary of one and over the past 2 days, I’ve been using my iPad quite frequently (in fact, most of this post was written using the Wordpress App).

Since its announcement and subsequent release, the general consensus appears to be a) the battery life / speed & industrial design is unparalleled, and b) the software is somewhat limiting. I’ll definitely echo these observations, however I’ve noticed much of the criticism has been focused on issues which will undoubtable be addressed in future OS updates. Everyone is busy looking at their feet, complaining about the immediate and obvious shortcomings, when they should be focused on where Apple is going with the iPad. Make no mistake about it, the iPad really is Apple’s reconception of personal computing, however they’ve only taken the first of many steps in that direction.

“It’s just a big iPod Touch”

When Apple first announced the iPad, an audible groan echoed across the Internet. It’s just a big iPod Touch appears to be the most common reaction upon seeing the iPad for the first time, and while there is definitely some validity to that observation, it’s not exactly true. Yes, the iPad looks and feels very similar to an iPod Touch, and yes they share the same operating system (which really makes them fraternal twins). However, the iPad currently sits uncomfortably between the iPod Touch and the MacBook; Born from a smartphone and wanting to be laptop replacement, but unable to reach its full stride. It wants to run—and starts to pickup pace— but then trips over it’s own feet.

Coming from an iPod Touch or iPhone, you’ll feel right at home. Sure, the screen is roughly 4x the size, but it looks and functions more or less the same. You’ve got the singular home button on the face, the same dock along the bottom, and the same lock screen (now with 4x the unused space!) . However, once you start using iPad-optimized Apps, it becomes clear that this is a different ballgame. The larger screen affords a completely unique experience, and the developer community is taking full advantage of this. It’s actually quite amazing how quickly the operating system disappears once you launch an App. The App fills the entire screen and you immediately feel like you’re holding an entirely different device. But then you try to delete something and a tiny blue dialog window appears, drowning in a sea of pixels. It feels odd and out of place, like a relic from a different era. There are all sorts of little details like this that reflect the iPads smaller-screen lineage.

You get the same feeling when you turn the iPad on for the first time, and you’re forced to tether with your computer and authorize via iTunes. Arguably, you shouldn’t have to do this with an iPhone/iPod either, but it feels even worse with the iPad. This isn’t a device that should require a separate computer. You should be able to give it your Apple ID and have everything automatically sync. Apps, email contacts, calendars… files. And this is where the iPad begins to move towards the MacBook and then stumbles. I want to save & edit files on the go, but there’s no meaningful way of managing them. While I believe Dropbox is vastly superior, Apple’s iDisk should really be the “exposed” filesystem on the iPad. It shouldn’t be an App like it is on the iPod, but a home directory that’s accessible by all Apps and sync’d across all your devices. But what happens if you’re sharing the iPad with other family members?

“The First Real Family Computer”

I’ve seen a number of people describe the iPad as the first real family computer, and I would agree that this is an apt description. My iPad will live in the kitchen and will be shared by my wife and I. However, when I started setting up my email and calendars and contacts, I realized that this wasn’t really going to work. We may want to share the device itself, however we don’t want to share applications. The iPad really needs unique user accounts, complete with independent setups. Of course, this adds a magnitude of complexity and I’m unsure if the platform can really support it. Fundamentally, the iPhone and iPod Touch were designed as single-user devices, but the iPad clearly has multi-user intentions. Being that the share the same OS underpinnings, I can see how the iPad could be weighed down by it’s resolution-deprived siblings.

I’m incredibly excited about how much potential the iPad has. I’m sure Apple will address the multitasking issues that plague it and the iPhone. I’m sure they’ll correct the odd interface holdovers its smaller siblings. And I’m hopeful they’ll introduce some sort of cloud-based solution for the file management issues. The only question is if Apple will allow for multiple users per iPad, or if they’re expecting 1 iPad per person. I have a feeling it’s the latter.

Now that Apple has officially released the iPad we want to start designing for it. While Apple’s interface builder is great, it doesn’t really allow us to create custom UI elements on the fly. We decided to take a page from our iPhone GUI PSD and create one for the iPad.

The PSD was constructed using vectors, so it’s fully editable and scalable. You’ll notice there are a few new UI elements as compared to the iPhone interface. The workable screen design is formatted to 768×1024 so anything you design in the Photoshop file can easily be brought over to the SDK.

It’s 1.0 so I’m sure we’ll notice missing elements as we begin to use it. We’ll perodically update it to include new elements as we notice them or as they become available through any SDK updates.

If you like it or use it, help us out by retweeting it.

Download The iPad GUI PSD Here (24MB)

(Thanks to Finn O’Hara for the photo)