iPad thoughts
Monday, May 10th, 2010
I bought a wifi based iPad pretty soon after it was released. Here is my quick take: The iPad definitely won’t replace my laptop or cell phone, but it is pretty handy as an entertainment and media consuming device. The screen based keyboard isn’t as bad as I thought, but still isn’t very efficient if I need to bang out a lot of text. I can see the form factor working really well for a variety of cases where someone wants to run specialized apps, such as the medical field using it for patient records.
Pros
- I’m using DropBox + GoodReader to transfer and view PDFs which is working well for reading on planes.
- Netflix streaming of videos is great.
- Kindle app means lots of ebook availability (Apple’s iBook store is fairly sparse now in comparison, but you get access to both).
- I’m really happy with the long battery life.
- Web browser is very quick and crisp (although I wish it had Flash support or more sites switch to HTML 5)
- Mail client/Gmail is very usable, although I still prefer a laptop keyboard for long messages.
Cons
- Wifi support is persnickety. I’ve had trouble connecting to some access points when both my iPhone and MacBook Pro were getting full signal. I hope this is firmware fixable. I thought about getting a 3G iPad but couldn’t stomach a single device broadband fee.
- Most apps originally targeted at the iPhone look either wimpy at original iPhone screen size or don’t scale up nicely when you switch to 2x magnifcationn mode