iPad discipline and first thoughts

This is my first post from the iPad using the word press applications, no wysiwyg formatting unfortunately, so I’m not sure what it will look like. Anyway here goes.

The good

— the hardware is wonderful, an excellent screen, very responsive
Touch, amazing battery life, easy to clean (using a micro fibre cloth) which should have been provided!

— the apps show great promise, although they are almost all at version 1, ie functional but not feature rich. They could all do with a few extra features to iron out their niggles in use.

— the performance is excellent, I’ve not experiences any significant lag so far that wasn’t a network constraint

— PDF reading is excellent, I’m using the paid app – GoodReader – and the scanned magazines and PDF manuals and work documents that I have to read a lot are first rate provided you can manage the small text. Executive book summaries and Gartner reports are even better, as they are not quite a4. I downloaded other PDF readers but none are a patch on GoodReader. However getting a large collection of books onto the iPad proved a bit of a pain, I longed to just copy files over to the file system.

— multiple-media is wonderful, I like to consume video podcasts while cooking, washing up etc and the iPad is perfect for this. I’ve also converted a whole load of tv programmes for when I’m travelling and these are excellent too

— I’m not a huge gamer, but even I’ve been immersed in the few that I downloaded, but that’s one more distration in life that I don’t have time for very often

— the on screen keyboard is excellent for typing. I’m currently using two fingers but it’s quick and easy and responds very naturally, the autocorrect is useful as well

— evernote is an absolute dream on the iPad, better than the pc and having my whole notebook offline with me is a real boon.

— the last pass tabbed browser is a very useful app, i use last pass on the PC so it’s great to have all my passwords with me and the ability to open multiple tabs slightly mitigates the lack of multitasking

The not so good

— Im currently in a GPRS coverage area, my Blackberry and iPad are both on o2, the iPad via my mifi. However it’s very noticeable how much more tolerant the bb is to the slow network working 100% reliably. Whereas the iPad frequently times out for example. This may be an issue that I rarely face, hopefully!

— the screen definitely suffers from reflection, it’s been fairly easy to workaround this so far though. Fortunately I had a loose weave micro fibre cloth with me and this is perfect. It’s possible to clear an active screen as well without any touch event being detected

— the iPad is very very distracting. I have a Sony ebook reader as well, when I use that I read! When I pickup the iPad to read I have a dozen other things to draw my attention away and so I’m going to have to learn to be disciplined all over again. This need for discipline makes me doubly pleased that I didn’t invest in a 3G iPad, the miff was MUCH cheaper and requires that extra step to connect, hopefully that will save me from living on line and allow me to retreat into books and magazines some of the time at least

— spoilt by the Blackberry I’ve grown up with multitasking. It’s a real shock to have to go back to a serial workflow, and especially annoying to have to explicitly open applications and then wait for them to update, which ideally would have happened before I needed them in the background

— not having a filesystem visible to all applications seems a real shame, it would be great to be able to backup at filesystem level and to easily copy files to and from the pc. Every application having it’s own synching support is a real loss

— I wish I never had to use iTunes ever again, unfortunately some synching has to be done via that route and I cringe every time it’s necessary