OR Me and My iPad

Okay, I’m the kind of guy who has to have every new gadget. Well almost. The reality is that a few years ago I become an Apple Fan Boy. I wrote about my switch from PC to Apple back in 2006, but with the iPhone and iTouch I pretty much joined the ranks of the apple fanatics and left it at that.

So of course I pre-ordered my iPad and my less than 6 month old Kindle started to shoot me dirty looks. But you know, it’s another Jobsian hyped product and well… I had to have it. I’d read all the stuff I was supposed to read. Scanned all the blogs. Updated my iTunes at midnight. And here I sit on Easter Sunday playing with my new toy. (And my wife and children are standing over me wondering why I’m playing with this instead of them on Easter Sunday)

The Good

Okay, everyone has pretty much reviewed all the same things so I’m not going to cover any of that. What I’m going to hit are the stuff that wasn’t obvious to me from reading to the reviews good and bad.

1. Media Consumption:

   Wow, this is unlike any other device I’ve ever played with. You just can’t get the experience of skimming through content with an iPad like you can on a touch or a phone. The big colorful screen making skimming USA Today, or NPR like nothing I’ve ever done. And in a world of been there done that, new experiences are to be relished.

   I have a net book, a laptop, and desktop, and a kindle, and this thing blows them all away. I never really enjoyed reading on a pc, sitting in my chair like a kid at school, and cuddling up with a netbook… well just sucks, even if you try to rotate the screen. As for my kindle? It is AWESOME at reading paperback books, you know novels, but anything else? Come on. Just navigating to a chapter or verse is a nightmare. But the iPad? It really feels new and different. This I give an A+

2. The Bad:

   It’s not really the bad. It is really more like the missing. I told my brother, the iPad is the exact opposite of a netbook. A net book is everything you want except the screen. Everyone knows the screen on ALL net books blow. Why? Probably because if they fixed that no one would pay for the much more expensive laptops. But an iPad is nothing but screen. And nothing else of a computer – no usb, no hard drive, no upgradable memory. No physical keyboard. Zilch. The bluetooth keyboard support for the iPad is nice, but an expensive add-on.

   No where the iPad has a lot of room to improve is when it comes to creation. For example, that nifty photo in this article? I had to take that with my iphone and post it with my iphone then copy it over. There’s no camera or way to capture pictures with this thing. Also, a lot of apps are missing basic functionality you expect from a computer but don’t miss on a phone. For example, log into gmail with safari, then try to forward someone an email… wha? You can’t. Or how about in mobile mail, you want to make some text bold, or italics, or underlined… forget it. Really? You’re kidding me.

   Also basic features you just get used to on a PC, I want to send an email to my baseball team and include a link to the game schedule and… iPad doesn’t multi-task. Instead of quick switching to a window in the browser with the information I need, I’m opening and closing apps. Man that feels clunky.

Summary

So we have to go, but here’s the bottom line after playing with it for a day. iPad has a long long way to go to be a competent content creation platform, even for bloggers. The lack of a camera is a big big omission. What’s more, the work pattern is so different, you just don’t realize what you’re missing until you reach for it and realize the platform doesn’t support it (like no scroll bar on the side of this text entry box in the word press blog page). And while Apple keeps hyping that flash is about video – Flash realistically is also about charts, and graphs, and useful tools (speakeasy.com), or livestrong.com weight management tools (yes, I’m trying to become a lesser person.) Video is perhaps the largest and… (wait for it) flashiest part of the web, but by no means is it the only useful application of Adobe’s signature web technology. Man I hope Apple and Adobe work this out.
But nothing, beats an iPad for enjoying wonderful media created by other people.

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update: Turns out going back to edit this blog with iPad safari is practically impossible. The text edit box has no scrollbar and the software keyboard has no arrow keys. So how do you scroll to the end of the article? I can’t wait until they start updating the wordpress and other apps for the iPad.

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