Forum Overview :: American McGee's Honda Civic :: My iPad experience

[quote name="Flack"]I've owned an iPad for a year now and have written several reviews of the thing for my own site. Here are all those thoughts, plus more, combined and truncated. I, like you, was convinced I didn't need a tablet. I have desktops, laptops, a netbook and an iPhone at home, so I really wasn't convinced that I needed a tablet. (At that time, I also owned a Kindle.) Furthermore, I'm vehemently anti-Apple. Unfortunately for me and my vendetta, they won me over with the iPod touch, and based on my experience with that, I soon bought an iPhone. By owning (and quickly jailbreaking) both of those devices, I learned that it is possible to own iOS devices and still avoid using iTunes, with enough effort. I was dead set on buying anything BUT an iPad and spent six months waiting for somebody (anybody) to release a tablet that was comparable in specs and size. I waited and waited and nobody released one. Everybody (Dell, HP, Acer) seemed convinced that Windows 7 was the way to go. The thing is, after using a tablet for a while, you realize that it's not a computer with a touchscreen -- it's a big ass phone, without the phone. Running a desktop OS is the wrong choice for a tablet (this is coming from a Microsoft Network Administrator). I really, really wanted to wait for a good Linux-based tablet, but again I waited and waited and nothing great materialized. The other common consensus seemed to be that the iPad's 9" screen is too big, and when the new crop of tablets began appearing with 7" screens, I bit the bullet and bought an iPad. The iPad is really good at being mobile. If you're a social media person, it's great at running things like Twitter and Facebook and e-mail and stuff on. I'm a pretty connected person (electronically, not socially) so to me it's like a magic screen that's always laying around the house that I can pick up and use. All the major sites I use have iOS apps that are designed to run fast and look good, so it's pretty rare that I use the Safari browser to, say, check IMDB. I just use the IMDB app. So there are a lot of things like that. There's a TMZ app and a Cracked app and an RSS app so those things are all fast and simple to do. There's also a VNC app that's really good for remote controlling machines to check logs and/or reboot them. I can't imagine doing that on any smaller of a screen. The iPad is also a hell of an eBook reader. Along with all the major apps (iBooks, Kindle app, etc), there are lots of good PDF readers as well. I run GoodReader and it works great. Those Kindle commercials push the fact that you can't use an iPad outside (you can, but you'll be looking for shade). They neglect to mention you can't use the Kindle in the dark. I literally take my iPad to bed with me every night -- not for the porn, but for reading books. All iOS (iPhone, iPod) apps run on the iPad as well, so for multimedia you've got things like Pandora or whatever. I use AirPlayer to connect to my server upstairs and stream music, pictures, and movies. We don't sit around and look at photo albums. If someone comes over and (for whatever reason) wanted to see pictures from our last vacation, I can pull them up on the iPad and just hand it to them. You can also stream movies with no problem. I have converted most of my DVDs to XviDs and you can stream those across the wireless network, no problem. I also run VLC on my iPad and have lots of DivX movies stored on there (the kids love it on road trips). I also have Netflix on it, so that works too. Things that I thought would bother me that I either got over, or never did: No flash, no SD slot, and the size. I'll admit, an SD slot would be convenient. Having to physically connect it to a machine to transfer data is sometimes a pain. (Dropbox is handy.) The no flash ... that's what every anti-Apple person comes at you with. "BUT IT DOESN'T DO FLASH!" Every flash site I access has an app. It's honestly never been an issue. Then again, I don't surf a whole, whole lot on it. As for the physical size, I wouldn't want to hold it all day with one hand, but it's fine for in bed and on the pot. Also, many of the cases (even the cheap one I bought) double as a stand. Just flip the lid around and it sits like a teepee on the bathroom counter so I can watch old Woody Woodpecker cartoons while I poop. I sold my Kindle about a month after I got the iPad. I tell people that if you want to read stuff you buy from online stores, the Kindle is the way to go. If you want to read PDFs you download (that would be me), the iPad is the hands down winner. The Kindle has a battery life that rivals the smoke detectors in my house, while the iPad gets 10-12 hours of run time, something like that. I would sell my netbook today if I could get any real money for it. It literally has not been turned on in six months. At any location where you can't set your laptop down (car, bus, plane, couch, whatever) the tablet wins out over the netbook. Two things the iPad (and, I assume, most tablets) suck at: virtual keyboards, and virtual joysticks. The idea of a virtual joystick is stupid. With no tactile feedback, my thumb inevitably drifts off every phantom joystick and I end up dying in games because of this. Games designed for tablets rarely have this problem -- it's ports of games (like Asteroids) where you run into this sort of thing. Maybe "the kids" are better at it than I am. Also, typing on a tablet is a lot like texting on a big phone. I do a lot of typing with my index finger, to be honest. Fortunately it seems like I use my tablet mostly for enjoying content and not creating it. I have on occasion written Wordpress blog posts and e-mails more than a line or two long. If I had anything of any length to jot down, I'd walk over to my laptop and do it from there. I'm not an expert on Linux/Android/Whatever based tablets so I can't compare the two. For what it's worth I haven't found anything that I've wanted to do with the iPad that it can't do. (There's even a port of DOSBox for it.) I got turned off by my friend's Android tablet that can't upgrade to the latest version of Android. The iPad 2 has a faster processor than the original. So far it's not an issue, but I assume some day, it will. The iPad 2 also has the dual cameras. Neither of those two were enough to get me to upgrade right now. Maybe next spring I'll look at the iPad 3 and compare it to the (then) current crop of non-Apple tablets and reevaluate the state of things.[/quote]