My wife and I bought a 3G iPad last month.  It was a gift to ourselves.  We knew it was a luxury purchase, and we were totally excited to have it for a recent trip abroad.  It took a little over two weeks to get it after we purchased it from the online Apple Store.  The anticipation grew.  It came literally hours before we had to leave for the airport on our trip to Croatia.  I rushed through the typical Apple product unpacking, got the 3G connection set-up, loaded all my iPhone apps, added a bunch of Breaking Bad episodes, synced all of my Instapaper articles and we were on our way.  There’s nothing like an 8 hour plane ride to dig into a new device.

I had high expectations for this device.  I’ve been incredibly impressed with the iPhone.  So impressed that I will recommend it thoroughly to my friends and family.  I only recommend products I truly love. (I’m a bad liar)  I really do feel that the iPhone is the best mobile Internet + phone + music player out there.  I recently got a BlackBerry for work.  My eyes hurt trying to read the tiny default fonts.  It may have a keyboard, but my fingers have grown since I was 8 years old.

I knew that the iPad wasn’t as big of a launch as the iPhone, but Jobs’s RDF is strong.  I wanted to hold web pages in my hand while lounging on the couch.  I do this with my laptop all the time.  This was the device for me!

But after about 3 weeks with iPad, I came to a few tough realizations.

• It’s heavy, much heavier than a book.  Find your best pillow to prop it up if you plan to read for more than 10 minutes.
• The screen is very, very glossy.  Maybe it’s just as glossy as recent Apple laptops.  Maybe I’m spoiled with my unibody MBP’s matte screen.  I was getting a lot of iPad glare in all except the darkest of rooms.
• The screen is bright, really bright.  Even though this setting is adjustable, I found my eyes straining to read text after 20 minutes or so.  It’s hard to describe.  I can read for hours on end on my laptop, but the iPad screen was actually harder on my eyes than a monitor or iPhone.  Maybe it was because I held it closer to my face.  Movies look gorgeous, but for anything that requires fine focusing (e.g. reading – my primary use of the iPad) I found myself straining earlier than I would have expected.
• Screen resolution is low and not of widescreen aspect ratio.  The iPad is 1024 x 768 (remember when that was the default on many PCs … in 1999?) and the pixel density is 132 ppi (pixels per inch).  Today’s iPhones are 163 ppi.  That means the iPad is grainier than the iPhone (and I’m keeping iPhone 4 out of this conversation).  Most movies are widescreen, which means big black bars on the top and bottom.  For a screen that is better at displaying movies than text (see above) it would be nice if the aspect ratio followed with most of today’s LCDs.  At least 16:10.
• Typing is awkward.  Significantly more awkward than the iPhone.  Wait, isn’t the typing surface area larger than the iPhone?  Yes!  It is a lot larger, but when I held it in portrait with both hands, and tried to type with my thumbs, I was a lot slower than I am with my iPhone.  If I set it down on a surface and tried to type I was faster, but really just longed for a real keyboard.  Annie and I thought typing in the 2x version of the Facebook app (which renders an iPhone style keyboard) was actually easier than the native resolution iPad keyboard.
• No Flash support.  Okay, I didn’t expect to join the masses in bashing Apple for their lack of Flash support.  I loathe Flash ads and all the poor Flash apps out there, but lets face it – there are also a ton of useful Flash apps on the web.  Annie watches Hulu, Fancast and other TV websites a fair bit.  They don’t have native apps yet.  My bank’s website uses a flash one-time password app to enable login.  NYTimes has released a lot of great visualizations using Flash.  I want to see the web move forward with HTML5 and less Flash, but the fact is that there’s a lot of Flash out there and if the iPad is supposed to replace my couch surfing laptop, it should support flash.  (Note: I haven’t missed Flash on my iPhone, but I think the screen size is a big part of that)
• It doesn’t fit in my pocket.  I know it’s not a phone, but if I’m using my laptop at home, and my phone is dirt simple to carry when I travel, when am I actually using the iPad? 

I know there are a few more small things, but the following two reasons are the ones that pushed me to list, sell, and ship my iPad off in the mail today.

1. I could not recommend my friends and family to buy one.
2. While at home, it sits on the table while Annie and I use our laptops.

This brand new, snazzy, best of breed techie gadget was gathering dust after not even one month.  I knew that if I wanted to capture at least most of what we paid for it, I would need to sell it sooner rather than later.  So that’s what we did.

Is there anything good about the iPad?  Absolutely.  Will it get better?  I have no doubt.  Give me a much lighter, cheaper, easier-to-read (+retina) display, front facing camera, and I will reconsider, but I still do question how much of a laptop replacement it can be without a physical keyboard.  I want to Command-Tab between apps.  I want to open up 20 tabs, each with a new flickr image that my contacts posted.  I want to blather away on an email or blog post without reaching for my wireless bluetooth keyboard.  I can’t do those things with the iPad today, and that’s why I’m giving it up for a couple years.

Thanks to Marco Arment and Jeff Atwood for inspiring me to let it go (even if that wasn’t your intent, Marco.)

I love the design and simplicity of tumblr, but having no way to export my data from the service (in the foreseeable future) is prodding me to look for a new blog home.  That and the fact that I think I could learn a thing or two running the wordpress on my own.

C’mon, Brian, you haven’t posted since June 5th.

Damn twitter.  Now I have yet another reminder.  In the meantime, hang out on lala.com for a few hours.  That site is incredibly well-executed.