FedEx arrived before noon, and set-up was quick and painless. I chose the $15 250MB/month option, to see how my usage fares. I’ve been averaging about 230MB/month with the iPhone. So it will be interesting to see if the bigger screen boosts usage.

Had to run some errands in SoHo, and the 3G speeds were pretty zippy. Downloaded a small app quickly, and accessed the web easily as fast as my 3GS. SoHo is probably blanketed with AT&T towers, but it also probably gets insane 3G data volume, so it’s probably an anomaly signal-wise.

At 12:30 there was a line 8 deep at the SoHo Apple Store, waiting for the 5PM release of the iPad 3G. Went in to check out the latest cases, and they had a full rack of iPad camera connectors. Guess I didn’t need to bother ordering online… the scarcity of it being another Apple retail myth. Purchased a VGA connector… going to see if Keynote plays well with projectors.

No browser-based visual editing via WordPress using an iPad. That means I can’t post or update the website via the iPad. The HTML editor does work, but I can barely program my Time Warner remote, much less use HTML properly.

I knew this was coming, but was secretly hoping the problem would have fixed itself, magically, with the iPad 3G. I know that sounds ridiculous, but at Dacha Works, we’re eternal optimists.

Update: After posting my problem on the Word Press website, my visual editor began accepting text input that evening. However, there still remains a big mouse/multitouch gap to be bridged. As scroll-wheels have become ubiquitous, there often aren’t scroll bars on small web-based input windows. When confronted with one using the iPad, the only conceivable way to scroll that I’ve discovered is using the copy highlighter to VERY SLOWLY scroll up or down. Maybe there’s a multitouch guesture I don’t know about… hopefully. These are going to be buggy times as computing switches from point/hover/click to multitouch interfaces.

Camera A still barely works, but we didn’t expect 3G to fix that. They’ve still misspelled “serching”, so I imagine they’ve got their hands full with glitches. Just downloaded iPad Camera, so I’ll check back in on it soon.

All in all, I’m impressed with the speed and agility of the iPad 3G on the web. I expected a markedly clunky experience, but its definitely a worthy sidekick for mobile computing. The biggest issue so far is using a multitouch iPhone OS to handle PC-derived content editors.

Next I’m going to take on the thorny issue of file sharing and file management on the iPad. Without a folder system or clear finder, I’m still baffled about how this whole area will function once I get a sizable jumble of files on board.

-DW