I lied

Well, not really.

But I was not able to stay away from the iPad. No, I didn’t buy one. But I did visit the Apple Store last night (sep­a­rate from the open­ing day, when I did not go in the store, as pre­vi­ously reported). My sons and I tried out the iPad. We all liked it a lot!

A few observations:

- It would not rotate from land­scape to por­trait in some apps. (The rota­tion lock switch could have been turned on and I didn’t know it. I dis­cov­ered its exis­tence after leav­ing the store.)

- The inter­face was not intu­itive on Pages (the Word equiv­a­lent). I couldn’t find tools in the page view.

- The key­board takes some get­ting used to. If I bought one, I’d grab a blue­tooth key­board right away.

- I guess I’m used to the tra­di­tional Mac inter­face — not hav­ing access to the Finder would take some get­ting used to. (I do a lot with files.)

Advan­tages of Amazon’s Kin­dle? You can read it in direct sun­light. It has longer bat­tery life. More titles are avail­able. Every­thing else? iPad.

I had fun mak­ing my site the home page for Safari on some of the demo units. (My web­site hits will go up arti­fi­cially till the store per­son­nel fix that.) Also, one of my sons made the screen back­ground on some of the demo units look like a page filled with app icons — stealth lit­tle trick! Alas, though — the Apple Store resets them every morn­ing, so our lit­tle tricks lasted just a few hours.

Ver­dict? It looks like a great new toy (and use­ful work device, for many). If I could afford one, I’d add it to my toy chest. Alas, not for a while! And finally, David Pogue has a great FAQ page on the iPad here. And don’t for­get to check out the great explana­tory videos on the Apple site.