A Brief iPad review

I had an unfortuante incident about 3 weeks ago.  My backpack was stolen out of my car, and with it went 2 laptops, 2 cell phones, and my Kindle.  Not one to dwell on my misfortune, I made the decision to buy an iPad to replace one of my laptops as well as my Kindle.

I knew that there would be limitations, and so I had my home desktop to fall back on if things got tricky.  Tricky they have been, but so far I'm loving my iPad and feel I can accomplish 90% of what I need to for my business.  If you are considering picking one up, here's what I think you should know:

• You still need access to a computer with iTunes to activate it.  This wasn't a big deal, but I wish the guy at the Apple store had told me that.  I flat out asked if I could function pretty much without a need for a computer and he said yes.  Considering I needed one to even start using my new purchase, I mark that under the "FAIL" category.
• You need to buy an app to organize your documents.  I picked up Goodreader for $0.99, and had access to my cloud documents in Dropbox and Google docs.  I can pull down what I want and view as needed.
• Pages, Keynote, and Numbers applications are available... BUT they are "Lite" versions.  Be sure to check out supported fonts prior to porting things over because otherwise you are going to spend a ton of time manually updating them.  That said, creating a native Keynote presentation was pretty awesome.
• You still need iTunes.  Beyond the activation, anytime you want to move things to/from the iPad, you are using iTunes.  For all the images I wanted to use in my Keynote presentation, I first had to save them to my computer and then sync them to the iPad through iTunes.  You can't get away from being tethered to iTunes.
• Buy the VGA adapter: If you want to use any kind of external display (like a projector) with the iPad  It works great.
• Then get yourself another app to display webpages:  Apps like Pages, Numbers, Keynote and YouTube will work through the VGA adapter connection.  Safari will not, so I had to grab another app for that.  I use iDemoWeb, but there are several available now.
• You can print from the iPad.  Again, you need to buy an app for it, and I'd recommend reading the reviewer comments to make sure that a) you don't need a comuter with installed software to do so, and b) you can print what you want to print (email, email attachments, contacts, etc.)  Do your research here.
• 3G works great, until it doesn't.  Pulling email and surfing the web work great over 3G (just like the iPhone).  Trying to watch a TV show through Netflix was an exercise in futility (and I don't live in New York or San Francisco).  Wifi works great the majority of the time for anything streaming.
• Flash isn't supported here.  Just in case you didn't know that from experience with the iPhone.  It is a bit annoying, and has been another reason I've had to resort to using the desktop for some web surfing.
• Not all iPhone apps are iPad ready.  Facebook and LinkedIn both show up iPhone size on the screen.  You can blow them up to 2x the size, but the display is distorted and it looks like crud.  I'm sure both sites will be releasing updates in the future, but for now I'd stick with the web version.

The iPad is the closest thing I've found to being truly mobile without lugging around a laptop.  I like it much better than my netbook, and I feel comfortable traveling with it for short trips.  For the cost, in my opinon it's worth the investment.

Cheers!

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