I am not an Apple fan. I do not mean that I have anything against the company. Far from it – I am incredibly impressed by their ability to create products and market them so that they really do have a “fan base”. I have used a PC for ever and, whenever I have tried a Mac, I feel that I do not know what is going on. I have never had a compelling reason to consider a switch. I have an iPod – a classic model which stores my entire music collection in my pocket. Even though there are a ton of other MP3 players around, I somehow feel that an iPod is the “real thing”. See: Apple’s marketing even works on me!<\/p>\n
That is how things were. And then, along came iPad …<\/p>\n
I read all the hype prior to the launch. I saw the videos. I felt a desire welling up in my heart. I wanted one, even though I could not say exactly why. I guess I had a feeling that this thing would either flop in a few months or it would change the world. If it was the former, I could accept the possibility of being the owner of [another] expensive paperweight. But the possibility of it being the latter is what drove my desire.<\/p>\n
They announced that iPad would ship [in the US] on 3 April. That is my birthday, which I took as an omen. As I live in the UK, I would have to wait until the end of April, but I could stand that. Then came the announcement that, due to the success of sales in the US [I read today they topped the million mark], shipping abroad would be delayed. It looks like late May at best.<\/p>\n
Fortunately, last week I needed to visit the US briefly and my credit card was ready. I was excited when a colleague showed me his iPad – at last I had seen one in the flesh and had a few questions answered [thanks John]. I was rather dismayed when I phoned a couple of local Apple stores [in San Jose, CA] and was told that they had no stock and my best bet was to go to San Francisco, which I had no time to do. I figured that the imminent launch of the 3G models might be causing confusion. So I made a plan to visit two stores on my way to the airport and I struck gold. One had just received a shipment and they were happy to take my money. In planning my purchase, I could not decide whether to get the 16Gb [as I was just dipping my toe in the water] or 64Gb [no chance of running out of space] models. As it turned out, they had only the 32Gb and 64Gb models. I elected for the compromise – 32Gb – but remain concerned; should I have spent the extra $100 … ?<\/p>\n
My plan was [and still is] to play with it and see what it can do for me – very much a solution in search of a problem. For the moment, I can only give a few initial impressions; I will make further posts in due course.<\/p>\n
First off, iPad is a delight to use. The complete absence of manuals disconcerted me initially, but it really is very intuitive. It feels very nice and many of the things that I needed to learn [like multi-touch zooming] quickly became second nature. The odd thing is how tiny my Android phone looks\/feels now.<\/p>\n
The biggest benefit of the device is clear: availability. It is small and fairly light and, most importantly, is ready to use in a moment. So, I can have it by my bedside, for example, and, if I wonder about the weather, I can have the forecast in front of me in [literally] seconds. A laptop might come out of standby quite quickly, but not that fast. There is also something very unobtrusive about the iPad form factor.<\/p>\n
My feel is that the value of the device will come from accessing data, rather than creating it. Having said this, my typing on the on-screen keyboard, though a bit slower, seems to be more accurate than with a conventional one, particularly when I prop it up using the recommended case. Yesterday’s release of DropBox for iPad could be a great benefit in enabling access to data. I am also wondering about Evernote.<\/p>\n
My first disappointment is the lack of an App Store in the UK. If I try to access it from iPad, I get a message saying that it is not available in this country. I assume that this will change in the coming weeks. I can access a more limited range of applications via iTunes, which is non-ideal, but gives me something to be going along with. I would like to get Keynote [the Apple equivalent of PowerPoint], but that is not yet available. I did obtain one app, which I would really like to use – a mind mapping program – but it only supports the iPhone screen size, which is a frustration; hopefully the developers will address this issue soon.<\/p>\n
There will be more to say and further postings will follow. For the moment, am I happy with iPad? Yes – it is fun.<\/p>\n
Is it useful? Good question. Only time will tell.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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