dimanche 2 mai 2010

iPad review, 3 days in

So after being very skeptical of the iPad (and hating the name) after playing with one for 45 minutes in the store I realized its actually not that bad and potentially useful for some things, so I bought one to try it out further. 3 days in here are my thoughts:

It's good for:
* Watching Netflix and ABC shows on something thats easy to carry around the house
* Watching my stock values go down, the Bloomberg app is great
* Watching interviews with Lena Meyer-Landrut (and otherwise wasting time) on YouTube
* Being a portable RDP thin client for a Windows machine (using the Wyse app)
* Reading magazines like Vogue France using the Zinio app (which sucks on an ebook reader)
* Reading letter/A4 size pdf files (like the ones from O'Reilly books) using Good Reader (which also sucks on an ebook reader)
* Watching movies on an airplane
* Looking at naughty images in the photo viewer (preferably not on an airplane)
* Holding a charge for more than 6 hours (looking at my phone thats charging right now, no not the Blackberry, the other one.)
* Having something decently sized thats connected to the 'net that I can carry around the house, while moving my laptop from one room to the other is not exactly hard, it's not nearly as convenient and just picking up the iPad.
* Feeding my being-connected-to-the-internet addiction
* Browsing /b/ (yay for browsers that run completely sandboxed)
* Having a password protection option that will wipe the device after 10 failed attempts at unlocking it

It's ok-ish for:
* Ordering pizza from papajohns.com
* Facebook
* Carrying around a $500 map of the Berlin public transit system
* Trading stocks online
* Selling my possessions on eBay
* Sending sweet online birthday cards
* Creating mind maps with MindNode
* email (the mail client is nothing to write home about)

It sucks for:
* Reading actual books that you read from cover to cover. It's too heavy and the back-lit screen hurts your eyes (ebook readers are waaaayyyyy better for this, and mine is about 1/2 the weight)
* Taking notes during a meeting (unless you want to type them on the keyboard), since its a capacitive screen without digitizer pen support you have to do it with your finger and it comes out even worse than you would expect. (my ebook reader and tablet pc are great for this kind of note taking however)
* Not being able to get a refund on sucky apps (like you can with the Android app store)
* No flash support = no online porn (what am i supposed to do now after sending sweet online birtday cards? Unless you know a site that uses a not-yet-standard html5 format...)
* No silverlight support either for that matter
* Developers who don't use MacOS, there is no way to develop for this thing (or the iPod) on a Windows or Linux machine - heck even on MacOS you are forced to use crappy XCode to do the development.
* You have to upgrade your iTunes to the latest version which takes 45 minutes and plug the device into the computer before you can use it - it doesn't do anything whatsoever when you plug it in this time other than let it go past the screen that says you have to plug it into iTunes.
* Charging, it wont charge off of a PC's usb port because it needs a ton of power, so you have to plug it into the wall and even then it takes like 4 hours to charge fully.

All in all I'd say so far that it's worth the $500 I paid for mine, but I sure as heck would not pay the extra for the 3g model or even the higher capacity, not for my needs anyway.
It does fill a couple areas that other devices do technically cover, but not in as convenient a format, the real test will be to see how much I'm still using it in a month.