iPad arrives

Today arrived my iPad. Here are my impressions.

It took the Chinese manufacturer a week to build my iPad, and FedEx three days to ship it to me, exactly on schedule. (But subjectively, of course, it was a long ten days.)

The brown cardboard shipping box was bigger and heavier than I expected. But inside was a smaller box, like a nested Russian doll.

Inside that inner box was the iPad, its charger, and a manual. I expected a big powerful charger, but it looks exactly like the little one that came with my iPhone. I had heard the manual was a "thin book no one will read," and certainly the bloggers didn't, or they'd realize it was only a postcard showing the location of the power button.

Pushing that power button showed that China had politely fully charged my iPad, but also that it was a useless brick until I connected to a PC running iTunes. Like the 1997 Palm Pilot pocket computer, the iPad is clearly a mere adjunct to a "real computer," and not a fully-functional "netbook killer," at least not on its first day.

iTunes registered the iPad, after requesting my Apple credentials, and a few tedious "Accept license" and "Continue" clicks.

iTunes then offered to restore my iPhone backup to my iPad. This was exactly what I had hoped for. Last night I prepared for this eventuality, staying up late, syncing and backing up my iPhone, which is pretty much my primary computer. I still can't sync my iPhone apps, without iTunes threatening to erase my year of data (passwords, settings, and ebooks) but I did learn how to copy my apps from my iPhone to iTunes, and discovered I had 474 apps (!)

The "Do you want to restore" screen claimed I had previously sync'ed another iPad with this PC, which was plumb wrong. It also asserted that previous iPad was called "iPhone." Oops. Apple programmers must have been in a mad, mad rush to get this all out the door.
The restore took about an hour. (Deep breaths help the waiting.)