Gadgets and Me – The iPad

When the iPad was first announced, I was really excited, but a little bit wary of all the hype. I expected that I wouldn’t need to carry around my small notebook, instead I would have a device that provided almost the same features as my laptop. I nearly began to believe that this cool new device would reduce the number of electronic gadgets people carried around. Nearly. But my years in IT held me back and I looked very hard at the specification of the hardware and software and decided, NO, it did not do the business. Why?

• You can’t easily load Microsoft Office documents on the iPad 
• No access any data via a USB drive.  The iPad has no USB port, and its means of transferring documents—through iTunes—is pathetic.  Apple’s cloud strategy seems to be centered on iTunes. Which I have found to be wanting.
• Apple’s Microsoft Office-like products on the iPad are just cheap imitations. Apple’s Pages looks like a decent word processor, as does Numbers a spreadsheet manager, but these don’t hold a candle to Microsoft Word and Excel.
• You can’t use the excellent cloud-based word processing tools that other people offer like Google Docs. The iPad doesn’t recognize the rich-text format that these applications use, so it doesn’t display a keyboard when you try to type.
• You cant view different applications in multiple screens when using the iPad. I want to have my web browser appear in a split screen next to my text editor, and I want to be able to jump between applications—just as I do on my Mac and in Windows. The IPad allows you to listen to music as you work, but doesn’t do much more.
• You can’t watch Flash presentations that are used on many news sites
• there is no camera. The iPad lets you make Skype calls over Wi-Fi, but there is no chance of a face-to-face call, that’s because there is no camera. 
• Difficult to read in Sunlight
• Shuts down when temp gets to around 35C

I am sure that the iPad 2 will rectify all of the above, if not I will wait until they do.