The iPad Dilemma: Part 3

I’ve learned many things from being married.

• Always agree with your spouse …  she’s always right.
• Always remember your anniversary date and her birthday.
• Most importantly, never lavish more attention on a gadget (at least in part) than you do on your partner.  I knew this was true and I planned to be in the clear when it came to the almighty iPad.

Well, little did I know that leaving it in the box for a few hours would spurn scathing comments from both my father and my wife.  The most notable being, “Don’t you realize there are people in third world countries who don’t have iPads?” ~ Jennifer Barbee

Knowing that I either had to crack open the box or endure more suffering, it was time to start unwrapping.  (Poor me, right?)

First I needed to insure that iTunes was good to go.  Everyone in our family shares an iTunes account, and although I find myself humming to Lady Gaga on the radio, I’m not particularly interested in having my daughters music on my iPad.  Plus I’d moved all my music to my Motorola Droid and from computer to computer so I had songs that had to be found.  What a pain!!  So, how did I figure it out?  I knew I had my music backed up on another drive so I deleted all music in the iTunes account and selected NO to “delete songs from the hard drive”.

Then, I hooked up my USB to my Droid, downloaded the music folder on my hard drive and added that and the iTunes folder back into my playlist.  VOILA!  A couple of clicks and the problem was solved.  I am really happy that my MP3 account on my Droid easily allows for songs to be passed back and forth between devices and iTunes.  That saves me a lot of money.

I synced up successfully and was ready to rock, or at least geek it up “proper-like”.

Right out of the box, the iPad was fast.  I read somewhere that the iPad is faster than the 3G iPhone when it comes to apps that have been cached and that definitely seemed to be the case.

Most notably, what dropped the jaws of my wife and father (both avid Kindle users) is that the iPad had a Kindle app.  This may not be news to you, but was staggering for me.  Now, besides iBooks I had the Kindle store which offers waaaaaay more books.  It doesn’t have the search functionality or the in-book dictionary, but who needs those?  There’s no word that I can’t easily ignore if I don’t know it.

Another great app was the map.  It’s got Google flavor, the fact that you can pinch and zoom is no big whoopee … but clearly there’s much more area to maneuver with the large screen.  Plus I could run latitude and track anyone that’s agreed to letting me play “Big Brother”.

I’ve gotten used to the on screen keyboard and really like it on the iPod touch and the Motorola Droid, although typing in portrait makes me feel like I’m an elephant trying to dial a rotary phone.  On the iPad the onscreen keys were large and I quickly turned to two finger typing.  The screen moves rapidly from portrait to landscape as I turn the device over and over.  Every motion on the iPad is fluid, even to the cute little way that my items get whisked away when I hit the delete key.

The only downside I found is that it doesn’t support Flash.  At first I thought Apple was being kinda greedy not letting Adobe freely engineer within their OS (Operating System). I thought it would be a big leg up for Google, etc.  But let’s look at this another way. Even though Apple is taking a stand against plug-ins and looking towards HTML5, well, why not?

The death of Flash will mean the web world will continue to evolve, and let’s be honest: it won’t affect Adobe.  Adobe will continue to evolve with other apps, Photoshop, etc – it just won’t have a strangle hold with Flash.  Sorry to all the Flash people out there, this is just my opinion, but you know as well as I do, the web world is evolve or die.  Meanwhile my kids can’t play Flash based games on the iPad – too bad for me they won’t use it as much!  Wink wink.

More to come on the apps.

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