Go here.
Particularly notable:
I can’t really make much of a pronouncement about these apps but I was struck by the amount of restraint the apps’ designers used. A bigger screen increases the temptation to just keep adding interface elements. And yet it’s remarkably uncluttered. All of the features of a “real” spreadsheet are there, but there are appear to be fewer buttons and controls here than what you’d find on a typical Android tip-calculator app.
And:
Fast. Fast, fast, fast. I did absurd things, like zoom in and out of webpages with fast twitches of my finger tips. The iPad kept right up with me, millisecond by millisecond. When you drag something, you feel like you’re physically sliding a photo across a surface; no need to wait for the OS to catch up with you. When you turn the iPad, the screen switches display modes almost instantly.
This sort of responsiveness enhances the whole experience. In so many touch-based systems — yes, I’m flashing an impatient glance at Android devices — the interaction feels like “I have made an input gesture; the ebook reader app has received the ‘turn to the next page’ command; the computer is now rendering and displaying an animation of a page turning in this ebook.” On the iPad, it feels as though you put your finger on the bottom-right corner of the page and dragged that corner towards the spine of the book until it flipped over.
That’s the “magic” right there — put these factors together, and using the device feels like interacting with data with your fingers, rather than issuing commands though an abstract software interface.
