iLust, iBan, iTry, iHope, iReview
So this post can only be about one thing - the iPad. As a review, this isn't really going to be hot off the press and out as soon as the device itself. They have been around for a month or two now so are old news technology wise. For good or bad though, I walked into a store very soon after they arrived in Australia and they just happened to have three left so I bought one. In this post I am going to describe my experiences with it after owning one for several weeks.
When I first read about the iPad on the Web I must admit I wasn't really that taken with it. It just looked like a ridiculously over-sized iPhone and didn't appear to offer much more than its smaller stablemate (in fact, probably less).
Then I had the opportunity to play with one. Let me say there is a huge difference between reading about the iPad and having it in your hands. Unfortunately the one that I had to try out was a demo and there were none available for purchase. Here comes the iLust part. After trying it out for about fifteen minutes or so I was sold. I wanted one. At this time I was very fortunate to be attending a conference related to technology and education and it was great to hear the number of educational organisations that were really interested in the device and what potential it offered for education. These organisations were not simply jumping on a new hyped up device but were looking very seriously at whether or not it had the capability to support delivering better outcomes for their students. They were not seeing it just as a replacement technology but as a transformational one.
As a replacement technology however there are a number of benefits. From a very simple standpoint, as a parent I'd rather see my children carrying one of these around than a pile of textbooks and notebooks and/or a laptop weighing down their ridiculously oversized, overweight backpacks. A fairly trite example I know but all the same...
As a transformational technology, multi-touch, web-enabled, go anywhere devices offer so many new ways of exploring, learning and collaborating, with access to so much amazing information and great services. At about this time I was also reading about other organisations rejecting these types of devices unless they could effectively modify them and lock them down. There are some very compelling arguments put forward for doing so and it is very informative to listen to why such approaches are needed.
More locally we see a number of trials of iPads in schools, universities etc happening - educators are out there trying.
A disappointing aside however can be the media. I mostly read electronic media and it seems education is dammed if it does and dammed if it doesn't. I have seen posts criticising education departments for whatever approach they take (jumping on the bandwagon and having a go or working hard to provide a safe secure environment). They are never going to please everyone. However, the education system has many people passionate about education and passionate about making it relevant to the 21st Century and the world in which their students are growing up in. Let's hope they succeed. So, enough of the hype and big picture stuff - what about the device itself? Out of the box it offers some great features. Music, video, photos are all fantastic and what you would expect. The quality of the screen is great. The big improvers over the standard iphone applications though are the mail and calendar functions. They are fantastic. Email in particular is now fun to work with again.
If you are going to use the iPad more seriously (beyond entertainment) then you really need to consider some productivity apps. I downloaded the iWorks apps so I have Pages, Numbers and Keynote available. Now these are really stripped down versions of the desktop apps but for the price you would be foolish not to give them a go.
Pages works great for creating and reading documents on the go. The keyboard doesn't take all that long to get used to and after a few minutes effort you should be really competent in it. The lack of any tactile feedback creates a bit of a challenge but who knows what may happen in future improvements to this type of device (see this article for one possibility). The first thing I tried to do in Pages was review a document. To do so I wanted to highlight some excerpts of text but this is not possible (unless you make changes to the text itself). Pages on the iPad works great if you accept and can work within its limitations. I imagine it will only get better and the first version was just getting it out the door and onto the iPad. Keynote is good to for viewing presentations. I haven't really tried to create any serious ones but just playing with it gives me the impression that you could comfortably create some quite good ones.
Numbers was a bit of a disappointment for me. The interface just wasn't quite there and it seemed to 'clunky' to work with. Perhaps I didn't persist for long enough.
The Safari web browser looks great and works well for casual surfing of the Web. It really brings the Web to all parts of the house when at home and has been really useful in that respect. The iPad is far more mobile than a laptop so working in the kitchen, finding recipes, checking out what's on at the movies, television etc are now very convenient, as is access to all your favourite social networking applications.
It doesn't take long to discover the constraints though. You can't search within a web page (something I now realise I do quite often). No flash is a real issue (so Apple the entire Web really isn't available to you, despite what the ads say). Tabbed browsing is not there which slows things down. The good news however is you don't need to stick with Safari. I am now using iCabMobile which is looking to be a great browser. It is quite configurable, has tabbed browsing and you can search within a web page. A definite improvement over Safari.
iBooks is a great book reader. I haven't really got into electronic book readers but can quite easily imagine myself using this app quite regularly. The battery life is great. You really do get quite a few hours use out of it. I haven't timed it exactly but seem to have to recharge only every few days. It does take a while to recharge though.
Since this is a personal device for me rather than a work device (although I have been using it for work as it is very effective when mobile), I have put a few games on it and it is a good gaming platform. There are some really entertaining games out there that exploit the features of the device and this will undoubtedly get better as more games become available.
The Youtube app seems to be configured to your location which is really annoying. Featured, Top Rated etc all seem heavily biased to local content and I can't find any configuration options to change this (I hope this isn't what its going to be like in a 'filtered' world because I really dislike it - but that's a whole other story). I prefer, by default, to get global, not local content.
The Maps application is great - the increased size of the screen makes this a great interface to interact with.
Of course you can run your iPhone apps on it too. When run in standard resolution they look small on the screen but there is a x2 'button' that you can press to get into full screen mode. Some apps tend to look a bit ordinary when in this mode but overall they are ok.
Perhaps the best measure of how good the iPad is, is the takeup by the rest of the household. Our iPad is a really 'in-demand' device and everyone in the house enjoys using it. Its actually become a scarce resource now and I have to compete for access to it.
I (we) have the wifi only version and this seems to be good enough. Given the size of the device (ie I can't carry it around in my pocket or hand everywhere), almost all locations where I do go with it have wifi so I haven't felt compromised by not having the 3g version - after all, most phones now have reasonable web/data interfaces for when you are really mobile and need that sort of access.
The one thing that really annoys me about the iPad is the lack of a (front facing) camera. It would have made it a killer device. FaceTime on the iPad would be awesome - there's enough screen real estate to do quite effective group video conferencing. Deep down I just know I am going to be annoyed at being an early adopter with Apple again as I am sure the next version will have this in it. I just hope we see an addon camera available for 1st generation iPads.
So there you have it. Aside from the lack of a camera, for me this continues to be a great new device and one which I think is going to get even better as new apps come out that fully exploit it.
