A study of people reading long-form text on tablets finds higher reading speeds than in the past, but they're still slower than reading print.

I decided a while back that I wasn’t going to get an iPad. Instead, I’d wait for the second generation iPad next year. This has been my approach when it comes to new Apple products. Yes, I’m scared of the early adapter regret. As the launch date neared, my mind changed a bit. My wife is an avid book reader, and I thought it’d be a perfect device for her. But more importantly, I think the iPad will have a significant impact on how us web designers approach interaction design for this medium and the coding behind it. I need one to tinker with.

I bought one on Saturday. I love it. I won’t get into the philosophical aspects that have been debated by many recently, instead I’ll focus the rest of this post on web design/development for iPad’s Mobile Safari. Creating web sites that look and behave consistently on different browsers and versions have been the bane of us web designers’ existence since Mosaic/Netscape days. While I’m happy with the experience surfing on the iPad, I can’t help but to think, “argh another browser.” Even though Mobile Safari on the iPad is identical to iPhone’s, but the term “optimized for mobile” means differently for each device. The iPhone optimized sites are often minified version of the desktop sites, for speed and better use of screen real estate. The iPad’s browser offers the desktop experience, so it should be treated as one. I divided the rest of this post to two sections: iPad ready and iPad optimized, depending on how far you want to customize your site for iPad.