iPad a few months on. A short retrospective review.
One of my predictions for
10 things to look out for in 2010 was the Apple tablet. A couple of months later Apple announced the iPad, and I wasn’t convinced it was a magical and revolutionary as Steve Jobs promised. The general consensus in the tech media was that it was merely a large iPhone.
Several months later I got to play with one and almost instantly it clicked, surfing the web using touch on a larger screen was great. Seeing youtube and HTML5 videos within the page really worked well. I bought one thinking it to be a bit of an indulgence, an expensive internet surfing device.
Now having had the device for a a long while I’ve found myself using it in a different way than I imagined. I no longer ‘couch surf’ on my phone but use my iPad instead, in fact I rarely need to turn my laptop on at home now. I use it to stream live internet video’s whilst doing the cooking in the kitchen. I can even use the
TWIT app to IRC with the hosts during a live broadcast, true two way media. I can pop the Iplayer on to catch up with TV or stream live TV using TV Catch up anywhere in my flat. It’s the perfect carry around media consumption device. Apple are soon adding the ability to stream audio and video from the iPad to a variety of devices, making it even more handy.
It’s not just for fun though, my iPad comes in useful for work too. I can take meeting notes using
SoundNote and record the the audio as file, which syncs up with what I type. This is really useful if I need to jog my memory later on about a certain point I simply hit the word and the audio jumps to when I typed that word. There is an amazing 59p app called
Good Reader which allows me to open up files, unzip files, annotate PDF’s and download files from a server.
I’ve also moved to using a few more cloud services now both and have been discovering a whole bunch of helpful apps. I’ll cover some of these in a future post.
Incidentally my phone isn’t an iPhone but an Android based one which can turn into a mobile WiFi hotspot. It’s my iPads best friend and saves me paying for a data plan just for the iPad.