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I think I've fallen quite embarrassingly in love with the iPad. Like most people in the world, I laughed at it a bit when it came out as something that looked like a step backwards in technology, looking like the equally poncey iPhone except more cumbersome and without the phone capabilities, but ever since my parents-in-law conspired with me to get one for Whitney's birthday, I've come round to understanding what it is.
If you'll humour me for a moment or two - do you remember the Van Helsing film from about 2005, and more importantly, did you stop laughing at it for long enough to take in anything that was being said? I'm reminded of the thing that Mediaeval Q Substitute presented in that, the sort of holy hand grenade that he said was an amazing invention but nobody could work out what it was for. The iPad had the same problem - it occupies a sort of unique space in being a non-computer that's used... slightly like one in some ways, and people didn't really know what to do with it.
What it's mostly used for between the two of us is as a sort of roaming physical web browser, going between the kitchen, living room and bedroom. The moment I realized how much I liked it was when I was curled up watching British television on Youtube with it in my lap - it's far more convenient than starting up the PS3 and trudging round an onscreen keyboard with its Youtube proxy, and you'd be very surprised how much more manageable a device is when it's just a screen. When you need it, the on-screen keyboard is surprisingly workable for something with absolutely no tactile feedback, and while I wouldn't want to do any extensive word processing on it (imagining for a moment that anybody else in the world has called it "word processing" for the last fifteen years), it does its job for making couple of paragraph long replies to things.
Already I vastly prefer it over my work laptop for idle forum browsing, even though unlike my previous Slimnote, using my current Thinkpad isn't like sitting with a square, bleeping rhinoceros on your lap. You don't even have to lug around a charger or worry about where the iPad's plugged in most of the time, because it's made by Apple and therefore you can safely watch DVD-quality video with the volume all the way up for eight hours and only use up half the battery. You would think that the lack of multitasking would be absolutely crippling, but it isn't - you don't multitask on it, because it's not a computer itself. Instead, it's like having a single window on your computer that you can just pick up and walk away with - and I'm beginning to realize the convenience of doing that.
There is one criticism that it, along with all other Apple products, will never be able to escape from - that being that it is incredibly expensive.
If you'll humour me for a moment or two - do you remember the Van Helsing film from about 2005, and more importantly, did you stop laughing at it for long enough to take in anything that was being said? I'm reminded of the thing that Mediaeval Q Substitute presented in that, the sort of holy hand grenade that he said was an amazing invention but nobody could work out what it was for. The iPad had the same problem - it occupies a sort of unique space in being a non-computer that's used... slightly like one in some ways, and people didn't really know what to do with it.
What it's mostly used for between the two of us is as a sort of roaming physical web browser, going between the kitchen, living room and bedroom. The moment I realized how much I liked it was when I was curled up watching British television on Youtube with it in my lap - it's far more convenient than starting up the PS3 and trudging round an onscreen keyboard with its Youtube proxy, and you'd be very surprised how much more manageable a device is when it's just a screen. When you need it, the on-screen keyboard is surprisingly workable for something with absolutely no tactile feedback, and while I wouldn't want to do any extensive word processing on it (imagining for a moment that anybody else in the world has called it "word processing" for the last fifteen years), it does its job for making couple of paragraph long replies to things.
Already I vastly prefer it over my work laptop for idle forum browsing, even though unlike my previous Slimnote, using my current Thinkpad isn't like sitting with a square, bleeping rhinoceros on your lap. You don't even have to lug around a charger or worry about where the iPad's plugged in most of the time, because it's made by Apple and therefore you can safely watch DVD-quality video with the volume all the way up for eight hours and only use up half the battery. You would think that the lack of multitasking would be absolutely crippling, but it isn't - you don't multitask on it, because it's not a computer itself. Instead, it's like having a single window on your computer that you can just pick up and walk away with - and I'm beginning to realize the convenience of doing that.
There is one criticism that it, along with all other Apple products, will never be able to escape from - that being that it is incredibly expensive.
