Edible Apple

Video of Engadget’s hands-on with the iPad.

Their impressions:

• 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.

Walt Mossbert reviews the iPad over here.

Also, Apple has rewritten most of the core iPhone apps so they look more like, and have more of the features of, Mac or PC programs. But they aren’t mere clones of full computer apps. For instance, many forego standard menus for clever overlays and sidebars that work more naturally with the iPad’s multi-touch interface. Other app developers can do this, too. But, even if they don’t, the company said the iPad will run most of the current 140,000 iPhone apps, either in a small window on the screen, or in a full-screen mode. That’s a huge plus for a new device.

iLounge has a comprehensive look with tons of details about the iPad over here.

Check out Gizmodo’s initial impressions and video hands-on over here.

Apple didn’t really sell this point, but it’s the single biggest benefit of the iPad: speed. It feels at least a generation faster than the iPhone 3GS. Lags and waits are gone, and the OS and apps respond just as quickly as you’d hope. Rotating between portrait and landscape modes, especially, is where this new horsepower manifests in the OS.

Seth Weintraub of ComputerWorld and 9to5Mac spent 3 minutes with the iPad. Check out the video below.

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Next, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber throws his hat into the ring.

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And finally, ArsTechnica’s first impressions, along with a slew of photos, can be found over here.