The first reviews of the iPad are in from Apple’s hand-picked group of technology columnists, and while they mostly skim over the device’s features in a manner that leaves plenty to be discovered, several of the reviews contain tiny nuggets of new information.
British comedian and writer Stephen Fry claims in his piece for Time that the book Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne, shown in Apple’s promotional materials for the iPad, will be “bundled with every iPad;” given that the iBooks reader application is not pre-installed on the iPad, it is unclear whether the title will actually be pre-loaded onto the device itself, accessible for free only after downloading the iBooks app from the App Store, or whether it will be included in the iBooks download package as a full sample book.
Andy Ihnatko, in his review for the Chicago Sun-Times, states that the iPad allows applications to inform the OS of what types of files they handle, such that if an email attachment is received and the user attempts to open it, an “Open In…” button appears, providing a list of apps that can work with the given file type.
Other reviews, published by The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, PC Magazine, and Boing Boing offer comparatively little in the way of new information about the iPad apart from the reviewers’ own opinions and experiences, which predictably reflect tremendous exuberance with only modest caveats. The most notable new information they collectively contain is a range of runtime results suggesting that the iPad generally outperforms Apple’s 10-hour promised battery life by as much as an hour and a half, but may fall half an hour short of the claim.