Well, after spending most of the Easter Holiday focused on my iPad I learned a few things.
- It’s a little buggy. I have a few apps that crash out to the home screen (Evernote, and the ABC Viewer)
- It’s really challenging to update a blog with. Can’t wait for the iPad versions of Facebook and WordPress.
My favorite apps so far?
- Epicurious is georgious
- NPR – it’s awesome to be able to scan the articles, read them, or listen to the content
- GamePlan – Jason Giambi showing how to do drills in a collection of videos almost makes me not hate the money leach that is downloadable content (DLCML)
- Weather
- Google Maps with a window large enough to actually see a map instead of a single street or intersection
- USA Today – I’m now done with news papers. Officially, once and for all. If every paper doesn’t go to this…
None of the games have clicked for me yet, that’ll take some time but I know it’ll be a great gaming platform.
Kindle / iBooks
After a full day of use, my iPad ran down to about 18% of charge, so I threw it on the charger and grabbed my kindle. I started reading Bullpen Gospels by Dirk Hayhurst (funny but kind of depressing). I bought it through Amazon and started reading it on my iPad. When the batter got low I switched to my real kindle (v2) – but after an hour, I just couldn’t find a decent reading light – I went back, saw my iPad had charged to 40% and I snagged it and resumed reading on it. I may never use my kindle again.
However, there is one stupid thing about both the Kindle and iBooks readers – it’s the margins. Books have margins because (among other reasons) you need somewhere to hold the book without covering the text, or to take notes. But ebook readers a) don’t need margins for notes and b) I have the edge of the iPad or the kindle to hold. Why do I need another INCH of useless screen space? Can’t I just zoom to the width fo the content? This is the most stupid oversite in all these readers forcing me to use 1″ of screen for absolutely no reason. Get over it and let me zoom to the content width – just like mobile Safari.
The guys that nailed this are Marvel with their comic reader. I may actually start buying comics again. I think that was the first time I enjoyed reading a comic in 30 years. It’s better than the print editions.
So all in all, love the iPad. Will be interesting to see how much I really use it going forward, but it is now my default reader, of all kinds of media.