Yesterday Apple went and busted out iOS 4.2 for iPad, coming (discouragingly late in the year) in November. With it they also got some people from Epic Games up on stage to demo one of their creations.

The game “Project Sword” is still in the works, but I can tell you now it looks brilliant. This is because they have released a preview of the Citadel area of the game as a free app for iPhone and iPad. The free app is simply a walkaround where you can just run around the Citadel area (no other people to meet as yet, and you can’t go in many places).

The game uses the Unreal engine ported to iOS, which makes for some absolutely superb and quite frankly mind-blowing realtime 3D rendering.

I included some screenshots of Epic Citadel below for your viewing pleasure.

I was thinking the other day about how I use the iPad, Nexus One, netbook, MacBook, desktop PC and so on together. I found it strange how I could accept iOS 3′s restrictions on the iPad, but when I tried to use an iPhone I found myself constantly annoyed about being unable to perform the various tasks I wanted to do.

iPad Unboxing

I suspect what it comes down to is the fact that I expect my mobile phone to perform a lot of tasks – and in many ways, I have been spoilt by the Nexus One allowing me to do pretty much anything I could ever want it to. However with the iPad, there is no precedent – there hasn’t really been a truly widespread tablet of this kind before, so coming in to it makes it a new experience.

Nexus One

Sure, it isn’t without its annoyances here and there when things go horribly wrong (and hopefully iOS 4 will go some way to address that); but I still think the iPad user experience is managed and what I would expect it to be.

So, the iPad. It’s a few weeks in and I don’t regret buying it, and I keep finding new uses for it (and every now and again, a new problem with it) and keep on enjoying it.

One interesting thing I find about the platform is how many people keep coming up with “revolutionary” applications for it. None more so than in the (social) news sector.

It seems that it’s not more than 7 days between the latest revolutionary app for reading news coming out promising to change the way we consume content – and then promptly failing at it.

The problem with all of these applications is that they are simply not flexible enough. While their interfaces my be interesting and they do a good job of rendering content in a pretty and nice-to-use way, the actual content is curated in a pretty plain and unimaginative way.

I want to take a look at the major players in the news apps, and see where they do well and where they fall down. I’m mostly not going for the newspaper or magasine type apps here – they are not innovative at all and are of no interest to me. What interests me are the curation type apps, with interesting layout models and those that really take advantage of the iPad’s unique platform.

Initially I had somewhat dismissed iBooks on the iPad – I hardly read at all, and had very little use for it.

Now, however, it has somewhat come into its own as new features have been added and I’ve discovered things I didn’t know about.

So, 24 hours in to the iPad experience, what do I make of it?

In short – brilliant. There’s nothing quite like the iPad for doing some activities and working in certain ways. We all know how I feel about the iPhone – worthless piece of junk that it is. For me, the iPad offers a lot more than an iPhone and a laptop or netbook in many different ways, such that I can comfortably accommodate it in my ever-growing arsenal of hardware.

Here’s why.

iPad