I was hop­ing, des­per­ately hop­ing that Keynote for the iPad would become my ded­i­cated pre­sen­ta­tion and teach­ing device. Imag­ine it: high­light­ing, cir­cling, pre­sen­ter notes, and all of the media I could want in a seam­less expe­ri­ence, all pumped out of the video out cable to a project.

Unfor­tu­nately, it’s nowhere near that expe­ri­ence yet. It turns out that video out is han­dled in very app spe­cific ways. Keynote, for exam­ple, projects the slides onto the sec­ondary dis­play and sim­ply shows which slide num­ber your on. That’s right: you can’t see your slides while your present. If you want to see what you’re pre­sent­ing, you’ll need to look behind you.

But it’s worse than that. Let’s say I want to show a YouTube video; when I leave Keynote, the dis­play stops sig­nal­ing alto­gether. So rather than an ele­gant black screen, or mir­ror­ing the iPad dis­play, you get your projector’s big ugly blue no sig­nal screen. The expe­ri­ence is quite bro­ken. Any app that doesn’t explic­itly sup­port video out sim­ply doesn’t pro­vide a sig­nal. I can’t project any­thing on the web, for exam­ple, or sketch in front of students.

Luck­ily, most of these are soft­ware lim­i­ta­tions. I hope that the lack of mir­ror­ing isn’t a hard­ware lim­i­ta­tion. Does Apple know these things? Is it rec­ti­fy­ing these issues? Who knows. They’re not known for their trans­parency. Maybe I’ll find out that every­thing is fixed with iPhone OS 4.0…

After 4 hours of con­tin­u­ous use, I can con­fi­dently say that the iPad rocks in many ways, and fails in only a few. It’s a genius way to browse the web, to write short emails, to lis­ten to music, to watch short videos, to use Face­book and Twit­ter, to give sim­ple pre­sen­ta­tions, to read news, and to show pho­tos. Theres lit­er­ally no bet­ter expe­ri­ence out there for most of these activ­i­ties. It’s also a great sketch­pad — not as great as a real sketch­pad, mind you, but oh so much eas­ier to share and archive.

It fails in the obvi­ous places. The onscreen key­board is bear­able. I can tye a lot faster than on my iPhone or any cell phone, but I’m not get­ting my typ­i­cal 80 wpm. A wire­less key­board would make up for a lot of these lim­i­ta­tions, but it sort of defeats the pur­pose of car­ry­ing some­thing slim and light­weight. I’ve typed a lot on is in the past few hours and I feel a bit held back, but not so much that I don’t feel productive.

There are still some ways where mul­ti­touch is inher­ently lim­ited. One out of every 10 times I tap or drag, it doesn’t do what I want. This is no dif­fer­ent than on the iPhone, but I’ve noticed myself accli­mate to the inac­cu­racy. The device hasn’t got­ten any smarter, I’ve just got­ten more tolerant.

The iPhone UI toolkit still breaks many per­va­sive web con­ven­tions. For exam­ple, I’m typ­ing this in a text field in a Word­Press page, and scrolling up to edit the pre­vi­ous para­graphs is incred­i­bly slow, even with the two fin­gered scroll inter­ac­tion, com­pared to a scroll wheel.

But I already love this thing. For all of the activ­i­ties I men­tioned ear­lier, the iPad is the clear win­ner. It’ll sit next to me at my desk and be a con­stant source of dis­trac­tion dur­ing work. I’m think­ing it’ll be a ded­i­cated cal­en­dar while I use my lap­top. Time to start explor­ing what else this form excels at! Like mul­ti­touch visual pro­gram­ming, hint hint…