Bits 'n Bytes

First Week with the iPad April 12, 2010

Well, I’ve had the iPad for a week now.  I had reserved one for pick-up on April 3rd, so Tera and I went in to the Apple store that Saturday afternoon.  It was crowded, but there were no lines.  The Apple rep had the iPad ready and set me up right away.  The iPads are already charged and ready-to-go.  Shopping at the Apple Store is a pleasant experience.

The iPad has certainly gotten a lot of hype.  Some praise it while others proclaim it’s a poor alternative to a netbook.  I’ve been working with computers since the first microcomputers were available (even before the first IBM PC).  Many people would say the iPad brings nothing new to the table.  And those people are correct — however I do feel the iPad is a groundbreaking computer device.

While an iPad is essentially nothing more than an iPod Touch with a large screen, that large screen makes it much more useful device.  You are able to browse the Internet, read books and watch movies on an iPad Touch, but the small screen is less than ideal for these activities.  The iPad does not fit in your pocket, but it is much more portable than a laptop.  It’s the easiest way to access the web.

The iPad is much more responsive than my 3G iPhone.  Pinch-to-zoom goes as quickly as I can move your fingers.  Surfing the web is more natural than using a mouse.  The screen size is perfect for reading e-mail and viewing pictures (in fact, it can double as a digital picture frame).

The virtual keyboard is usable, but I wouldn’t want to use it to write a computer program or start a novel.  The iPad should be compatible with any BlueTooth keyboard (something I haven’t tried yet) and that might make more appropriate for tasks that require a lot of text input.

My big complaint is that you have sync it with iTunes to transfer any files.  That’s fine if you already have a computer, but makes it difficult to use an iPad as your primary computer or Internet device.  I know a lot of people who are afraid of computers, but want something simple to browse the web and do e-mail.  The iPad might be a perfect solution for them except that Apple wants it to be synced with a PC or Mac.  Perhaps Apple will get around to adding more features to MobileMe so that iPad users with simple needs could sync everything to cloud.

Another minor, personal annoyance is that I have been using my old Mac Mini to hold my iTunes library.  It’s running Tiger on a PowerPC and I hasn’t been any strong need to upgrade it to Leopard.  Except now an iPad cannot be synced to a Mac running Tiger.  It just seems a little strange to me that Apple supports syncing to a Windows XP machine but not to their own machines from that time period.  Ah, well.. that’s not going to be an issue for most people.