According to a recent survey in MacWorld, 16.3 percent of mobile employees already have an iPad or tablet PC device, and another 33.2 percent planned to purchase or receive one in the next six months. A surprising 59.8 percent of those planned to use it for significant amounts of work, while 30.8 percent said they would use it for mostly personal reasons but also for some work.
I’m always a bit sceptical of statistics, especially ones as glib as these, but the burgeoning tablet sector has certainly been given a huge boost by the arrival of the iPad. With that in mind, I thought this would be a good time to outline how I’ve been getting on with mine…
Never have I known a device engender so much comment – in NHS waiting rooms, on trains, in meetings, even on aeroplanes, where my gadgets have previously only ever known critical disdain from cabin crew! Someone even spoke to me on the tube, (the London Underground, that is, for our overseas readers!) which as anyone who knows London will confirm is, without exception, unheard of.
The conversations are usually quite straightforward variations on “Ooh is that an iPad, what’s it like?” but the more informed may ask if it has replaced my laptop yet. The device has clearly struck a chord with a wide range of people so, partly in response to all those questions and partly to put my own thoughts in order, here is an account of the trials and pleasures of the first month or two of iPad ownership. Hopefully, what follows will help you determine whether or not one might make sense for you, and if it doesn’t, well I’m delighted to have saved you some dosh!
It is a thing of beauty it has to be said. Shiny glass and matt aluminium, it does feel somehow right in your hand. The web feels very much at home, apart from the lack of Flash of course, but most pages are easy to read and natural to navigate. The instinctive expanding and contracting of pages with a simple pincer movement is a joy, in particular when used with Google maps that instantly rescale and refine themselves, O2 willing. And the battery life is amazing – I have yet to run it flat.
Anyone who has used an iPhone or similar interface intuitively knows how to use the iPad, but it is so much more than a big iPod Touch, as some have said. The iWork applications, Apple’s version of Office, are all highly useable and easy to understand. Redesigned for a touch screen interface, they also dispense with the files and folders analogy we have all become used to. Each application opens in a document browser enabling you to select a template or existing document to work with. Getting Word or Excel docs onto the machine is a bit of a process as it has to be done by syncing through iTunes, but actually it’s quite straightforward – a far easier way though is to email the documents to yourself and then open them in the application you want to use.
So what have I been using it for? In no particular order, reading ebooks and PDFs; browsing web sites, where only once or twice have I come up against the Flash problem, of which more later; social networking, with LinkedIn and FaceBook on their main web sites and Twitter using the excellent Twitteriffic, a much more useable application on the iPad than on the phone. Watching and showing video is very effective, whether from our HMX Gallery or external services such as YouTube.
For a taste of the future of magazines, and maybe the future for print in general, the iPad version of Wired takes some beating. It’s a slick, satisfying experience, equalling, no, surpassing the print version, with a level of built in animation and interactivity that is, dare I say it, cool. It’s also very impressive how advertisers are taking the opportunity to deliver much more interesting content, through embedded video and animations.
I’m not a huge gamer, but the usual favourites that I have tried feel strangely too big on this platform, Sudoku and MahJong, for example – although Solitaire and Othello work much better. Scrabble is a joy, with the iPad hosting the board and each players iPhone serving as their individual letter rack, although there are the inevitable dictionary debates. Driving games, at least the few I’ve tried, seem to work very well, using the whole pad as the steering wheel, but as for Shoot ‘em ups, no idea I’m afraid.
The killer though is, of course, can I work on it? Writing, budgeting, emailing, note taking, recording meetings, all an emphatic yes. I’m eagerly awaiting the iPad version of Daylite, our production management database, but spent some time with the iPhone version, which inevitably felt a bit constrained. This blog is being written in Evernote, which I find an indispensable tool for capturing all sorts of thoughts, which are then available to me on my phone or laptop with no further effort or thought due to the seamless syncing.
It’s also a great device to have on hand when filming, serving, as it has done, as a clapper board, a prompter, a portable and instantly updated question sheet and Call Sheet, and hopefully in future as a hand held monitor (app developers, there’s your challenge!)
It has it’s drawbacks, such as the Flash problem I mentioned earlier – Flash cannot run on the device, which means a lot of websites, including our own, do not work, or display strange gaps. But then again a lot of Flash applications require an accurate mouse for pointing and use rollovers to relay feedback, neither of which work on a touch screen interface, so I feel that even if Flash did work, it would probably be pretty much useless. I guess it’s an evolutionary thing like removing SCSI ports and floppy disk drives…how have we lived without them?
Overall then, it’s a fine piece of kit. Most of what it does could be done by the laptop or phone for sure, but not as well, or as satisfyingly. The more I use it, the more I find I can do with it and it has certainly become the device of choice when I’m at home for reading or browsing and yes, OK, checking my email while watching telly! And for many people, such as my Mum, I can see it becoming the only computer they need, far simpler, easier to use and always to hand.
Agree? Disagree? Let me know what you think…
