Delta Dental HQ - Photo Winner
About 2 months ago I won an iPad in a photo contest. To be honest, I was just starting to think about purchasing some sort of tablet, but wasn’t sure what to get. So this was a great time to try something out. Like I do with most tech/systems I made a commitment to carry it everywhere, and use it every day for one month. This is where things started getting fustrated.
Day one didn’t go well. In part because the OBE (Out of Box Experience) on the iPad isn’t very good. It took me almost 45 mintues after I took it out of the box before I could even use it. You have to physically tether it to a computer (seriously? Is this 1999 or something?), connect it to iTunes (again I didn’t even have that piece of software installed anywhere) and then the iPad takes it time updating all the firmware before you even get to turn it on. All in all, it put in a really bad mood.
I had a blast searching for and downloading apps. This was a fairly standard experience I had come to appreciate with my Android phone already, so at this point, online markets with lots of apps is the norm. One thing that took me a bit to get used to, was that all the iPhone apps are also in the same app store, and the strange nomenclature to delineate iPad apps is calling them ‘HD’. A bit strange since ‘HD’ has nothing to do with it…but whatever…guess they had to call them something.
I gotta say, this is an amazing piece of equipment. I probably get 8 hours of batter life, it’s fun to use, and gosh my photography looks amazing on it. I love the Netflix client, except that holding this thing threw an entire movie isn’t the easiest thing to do. You must get used to cleaning it as it’s a finger smootz magnet. But all in all, it’s fun. I am still not used to how to lock the thing from rotating all the time (the menu lock is buried a few swipes deep in a menu) which is annoying especially when watching movies.
One other app I tried was based on a suggestion from @brettmaxwell This is a wireless shooting application. I used an SD Eye-Fi card in a CF Card adapter. Then ran the application Shutter Snitch to snag the photos from the eye-fi card. I am a RAW shooter so you have to switch to shooting both RAW+Jpeg for this to work. It worked, however the delay between shooting and it appearing on screen was anywhere between 3 and 15 seconds so the delay was a bit annoying. If this wasn’t so much of a hack, this application alone would probably have me keeping the iPad.
Probably my favorite app on the iPad has got to be Flipboard. It aggregates all my facebook, twitter, RSS newfeeds, Flickr & other social media links into a easy to read flip style newspaper.
But now come the major issues. I always have my laptop and DroidX with me all the time. So checking email/calendar/contacts is a lot simpler on my phone. Even checking Google docs and doing some basic info capture (like car mileage, etc) were simpler on my phone. So where does this fit in my life?
I started using it for hardcore note taking and computer surfing. However for note-taking it was very very frustrating. While you can kind of type on this, for a touch typist like me at 60wpm, it’s just not usable. But you can hunt and peck, and it works well for that, unless you are an Android user who has become accustomed to some amazing swiping/predictive keyboards that allow you type very quickly. Not having these drove me crazy with how long it took to enter in my notes. But for computer surfing it is a brilliant device, especially the casual “lets follow this link to that link to this link” surfing. Well, almost brilliant, the simple fact it doesn’t support Flash, and Safari not always rendering pages (or even working pages in some cases) seemed to have me reaching for my laptop on an all to frequent basis. So where does this fit in my technological life?
When expressing my concerns on this, one friend @david_so_mike had a theory. This device is geared toward consumers of information, where I tend to be a content creator. So I checked with Noel Heikkinen as I know he is a heavy iPad user. His suggestion was that the iPad isn’t not so much a replacement for your laptop, as he wants to go back to a desktop machine, and use this as his mobile device. I can see that working, but with the level of development, photo/video editing I do, I just can’t give up the laptop.
So what am I going to do with this iPad I won? Either gonna sell it, or maybe give it to my amazing wife to use as a home schooling tool. Either way, I just don’t think this content creator has found a fit for this tablet (or really any other tablet) in his technical toolbag.
