What is my experience of the iPad so far

The iPad is neither fish nor fowl.  It’s not a phone, it’s not a laptop. Its useful but fiddly.

Leaving the laptop behind I took the iPad away for a weekend when visiting family – things I had to work on were a slide presentation for Monday morning, emails, along with notes to write and verify by using the internet. What was Great, what was Average, and what was Pants?

Great

INSTA-connection.  Bus, plane, 10 mins at a cafe.  There’s no ‘firing up’ your computer.  Switch on. You’re connected

LOADS of battery power for the plane.

I can move images around with a swivel of my fingers, whether in pages (word document) or on slides.  It’s like magic.

Internet connection and gmail is great to use. So far hasn’t ever not been able to connect.

Skype – sound quality is fantastic and it’s not even made officially for the iPad yet

Light, easy to transport (in comparison to taking my laptop everywhere), great for showing presentations.

Reading – it’s my first experience of reading a book on a computer.  I’m addicted.

I can play on it – lots of fun apps to brows and go ‘ooooh look at that’ – free.

Average

You can only work on one thing at a time – I’m guessing that’s a first generation thing. So there’s a lot of flipping back and forth but things open exactly where you left off and they open quickly.

No camera (some may say that’s a good thing).

Writing and taking notes – is done via typing on a keyboard on the screen.  It’s slower than using a mouse and keyboard but on the plus side you don’t have to take them with you.

Auto-correct – you need it more because of the keyboard set up and when it works great, when it corrects wrongly it’s a pain (see lack of arrow and delete keys below).

Slide and document fonts are not as extensive as on laptop.

Pants

Typing, moving things around are all done with your fingers (as opposed to keyboard and mouse).  It’s Fiddly if you’re not used to Mac movements on an iPhone (which I’m not) I kept selecting the wrong thing, deleting when trying to paste – with practice and I suspect that will get easier, and the developers may also make it easier.

No delete key and no arrow keys. Very annoying.  You have to press on a word, get the curser in exactly the right place and then fiddle to edit it.

Because of the ‘finger editing’ – working on documents and presentations is Slow.

Social sites – I share a lot of things from websites.  Sharing urls on facebook and twitter is a few too many clicks yet.  Not convenient or easy.  Again, suspect it’s a first generation thing.

Tried to edit a wordpress blog – wouldn’t show me the html code.

Overall

I can’t easily do on an iPad everything I would do on a laptop, but I can do the majority of things.  Am I glad I’ve got one – very. Main things are small, transportable and I love the INSTA-connect, no fuss, no hassle, and I’m online with all my work software to hand. Also, I have books, music all within a touch of a finger, for some reason this works psychologically for me better than on the laptop.

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