Sadly, I've already experienced my personal biggest drawback to the iPad. I'd asked if it did Google Reader. Well, it simply doesn't. I can view it in mobile mode, which is essentially just a long list of stories, but when I choose desktop mode at the bottom of the page, it displays everything fine,and I can click on any links that are displayed, but. The second I try to scroll through a feed, it instead moves the entire window like it were all one image or something. So does mobile Safari not do Ajax or something?
Mobile Safari does do AJAX. It however doesn't do mouseovers, or other desktop UI metaphors. The proper interface in this case would be the "mobile" Google Reader, as it's built for touch input. My coworker here said he's been using the mobile site, and is quite pleased with it so far. Google has been adding iPad (or tablet form factor) changes to their apps, so maybe Google Reader just needs a quick update. GMail is apparently quite nice, but I'm not a GMail user either so I can't comment much there.
*edit*
Looks like two finger scrolling works when using the desktop version of Google Reader. Seems a bit odd, but I'm so far out of web development these days I can't explain why this is necessary.
I believe I've also found another defense for the trackball on my Nexus One. I just tried to go back up in my post to change or add something, and I can't. Maybe I'm just not familiar enough with the iPhone OS to know how, but it certainly isn't clear to me.
Again your trying to apply desktop computing concepts to a touch based device. Just touch where you want to put the cursor. This to me is the big difference between Android and iPhone OS. Android still has some desktop UI design in it, with things like dedicated zoom and scroll areas, cursors movable by other methods then touch, context menus activated by a special button, and so on. iPhone OS on the other hand throws it all out and starts over to try and build a pure touch based interface. Google wanted to make a smartphone, Apple wanted to make an entirely new computing interface and just happened to start with the smartphone.
Lastly, as I suspected this thing is just short of an ergonomic nightmare. I've been typing this I landscape mode, and having to tilt my neck or lower my eyes to look at text directly above the keyboard is starting to hurt. I'd say this is an average amount of writing, and I can't imagine typing more than a couple sentences on this. I haven't tried the dock, though, so that might help.
I'm a big fan of the Apple case now, as it does provide a non flat typing angle with the full landscape keyboard, and that helps quite a bit. If I was going to type out a whole document though, I'd reach for a real keyboard, and conveniently bluetooth ones just work.
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