If you're an iPhone owner, you should immediately notice the performance benefits afforded by the iPad's A4 processor. Finger-swiping through menu screens is a faster, more responsive experience. Screen-switching performance never really felt "slow" on the iPhone, but now it does feel slightly kludgey compared to what the iPad offers.

iPad App speed benchmarks

App loading is also measurably faster on the iPad. Games can be some of the worst offenders in this area, so we used Tiger Woods PGA Tour and Peggle for test drills. On the iPad, Tiger took 5.5 seconds to load; on the iPhone he needed 8.4 seconds.

On the iPad, Peggle was ready to play within 5.8 seconds; on the iPhone it loaded after 8.4 seconds. It's important to note that we were using the iPhone version of each game app on the iPad, so it's as direct a comparison as possible.

We saw even more dramatic performance deltas when it came to website load times on mobile Safari. On the iPad, boingboing.net loaded in a quick 6.2 seconds; on the iPhone, the venerable tech-culture website required 19.3 seconds.

On the iPad, GamesRadar.com (a TechRadar sister site) loaded in 10.5 seconds; on the iPhone it coughed and wheezed past the finish line in 21.3 seconds.

Of course, we expected the fastest performance numbers from Formula1.com, and we got them. On the iPad, the F1 site took pole with a load time of 5.4 seconds. The pace wasn't so impressive on the iPhone, however, as here we saw a time of 9.9 seconds.

And don't blame our connection interface for any of these performance disparities: Both the iPhone and iPad were using a full-strength Wi-Fi connection.

So you get the idea: The iPad is fast. But screen redraw speed aside, what's the interface experience really like? How does it resonate on a deep, personal, tactile level?

Looking deeper in the iPad

First off, the iPad's (now-famous) omission of app multitasking and Adobe Flash support is more annoying than it was before. Indeed, as the iPhone OS is ported to the larger screen real estate of the iPad, the hands-on experience becomes much more computer-like, and we begin to really feel the loss of bouncing between multiple apps without quitting any single one of them.

(Of course, multitasking will be added in the iPhone OS 4 update that we hope comes to the iPad in the Summer of 2010).

Flash is not an option on the iPad, meaning great sites like moodstream.gettyimages.com simply don't work.

Likewise, with mobile Safari now the size of Internet Explorer on any Windows netbook, we really begin to notice the fact that this lame excuse for a browser can't deliver what, for better or worse, has become the baseline web experience.

Make no mistake, kicking back on the couch and browsing the Internet with one's feet on the furniture is exactly what makes the iPad so fan-frickin'-useful. Peeling through Lostpedia.com right in the middle of watching Lost is why so many of us geeky gearheads will love the Apple tablet.

Nonetheless, we'd be remiss if we didn't call out this pitiful lack-of-Flash situation, which, if Steve Jobs is to be believed in his *open letter* [http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/] is never going to change. Let's hope HTML5 provides the answer that content developers are looking for.

Another user-experience quibble: There are unnecessarily wide gutters between the icons on the home screen. We appreciate that the app icons are larger, but we don't see why the UI designers didn't add one more column and row to the grid. Even better, they should have given us user-adjustable icon sizes and grid arrangements.

Once you're inside any particular app, all the familiar multitouch features are available. We won't repeat them here, as there are only a few-thousand-million videos online that demonstrate the pinching, swiping and tapping that's involved in navigating the iPhone - and now iPad - interface.

However, if you haven't experienced mutitouch-driven screen navigation and data entry, we can assure you that it's the answer to tablet computing.

Seriously: web surfing, flipping through photo albums, and pretty much any kind of casual computing activity is a simple, idiot-proof affair on the iPad. And thanks to the device's screen-dominating virtual keyboard, typing in web addresses and composing emails are easier tasks than they are on the iPhone.

The iPad's keyboard

Now, that said, we still have to share a caveat. The iPad's onscreen keyboard, while large and responsive (if a virtual keyboard can even be considered "responsive") still suffers unnecessary interface problems.

It's a basic retread of the iPhone keyboard, so it doesn't have a row of numbers at the top as a traditional QWERTY keyboard would. So if you need to type a number, you have to hit the number ".?123" key to switch modes.

This appears to make no sense, given the large swath of screen real estate the GUI developers had at their disposal, but it does mean you can type at speeds matching a physical keyboard. We still found it annoying that we didn't have numbers available on the same screen.

How about this, Apple: let us make the decision. Give us Settings menu options that allow us to choose among different keyboard layouts.

That small complaint aside, we're quite happy with the iPad's data entry, and wonder what an alternative-history timeline might look like had Microsoft made better decisions circa 2002. If it had just abandoned the stylus and come up with multitouch on its own, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition might have invoked such good vibes, and we all might have forgiven Windows Vista just a few years later.

Instead, Microsoft gave us specious handwriting recognition, and a dainty-small virtual keyboard that required pecking with a stylus. Lord only knows how many tablet users were scarred for life.