Took a wander into town earlier today and made the mistake of taking a slight detour to the Apple store for a look at the iPad. I fear this may have been a mistake because now I really want one.
Much has been said about the iPad and how it “is just a big ipod touch” and whilst that is technically true (ish), it is missing the point somewhat.
From my brief 10-minute play I made a few observations…
- The screen is incredible – everything looks fantastic, especially photo’s
- It is quite weighty and holding it will get tiring after a while
- The own-brand applications such as Mail, Keynote etc look excellent and are intuitive – as you’d expect
- It really is good for reading websites
- The photo application is brilliant fun, cool animations and multi-touch features
I then started thinking about how I would use it at home. I wouldn’t bother with the ipod functionality – I already have an iPod Classic for that…and I wouldn’t use it for my blogging, mainly because I already have a laptop and a desktop to do that.
I would cram it with photo’s however – that screen really is exceptional. If you’re a photographer and you are trying to sell your work, what would sell it better than pulling an ipad out of your bag with your portfolio ready to view in a few seconds?
Instruction manuals – they’re increasingly coming on PDF rather than paper these days, so loading them up onto your ipad or onto a cloud service like iDisk or Dropbox would be far better than printing them out or lugging your laptop or even desktop around.
I think if my wife and I bought one to share, it would sit on the coffee table primed and ready for when something came up that required a “bit of googling”, for instance, if a holiday or product came up on the TV that looked interesting, or if a live TV programme was keeping track of opinions on Twitter. Either that or it would make a fine digital photo fame…in fact, probably one of the best photo frames on the market.
The jury is out on whether I could justify buying one…really…I can think of things I would use it for, but the smart answer is to say I can do everything on the platforms I already have. However, if you are in the market for a netbook just for portability and for something to check your emails, Facebook etc, do yourself a favour – save up a little longer and get an iPad instead. If you already have an iPhone or iPod Touch, chances are you already have a load of apps ready to go. iTunes now splits apps between iPhone and iPad now and the number of apps I have that are sitting in the iPad section seems to be growing.
Is it worth £429 for the 16gb Wifi-only version…maybe. It is certainly a quality product and potentially invaluable to photographers, but I think I’m going to wait and see.
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