One year later with an iPad
I brought an 32GB iPad 1 about a year ago with without having any clear purpose for it. At the time, I owned an iPhone 3G so it already seemed odd to own two iOS devices (I now have an Orange San Francisco Android) and on top of that, I also owned a Macbook making a total of three portable devices with overlap.
During the initial period, it really did feel like owning and maintaining a second giant iPhone as I was using the same apps albeit on larger screen. The only difference I noticed at the time was that Internet browsing was a much better experience and the general performance was a lot better.
I started to wonder why I brought the iPad in the first place.
Slowly, I started to realise that most of the things I do on my laptop which included web browsing, email and chat, could be done on the iPad.
The laptop started staying at home a lot more and was later sold and replaced by a much more powerful iMac.
With more and more apps taking advantage of the iPad’s larger screen, it started to become more and more easier to access and view media via these apps.
Marvel and DC have their own eComic reader. Many games benefit from the larger screen, especially board games like Scrabble. TED, iPlayer, 4oD where also available to watch Internet media. GoodReader and Dropbox allowed me to take my electronic library with on the go. News apps like Flipboard, Reeder and Telegraph meant I could keep up with my favourite blogs and current events easily. eMagazines such as Project are showing the possibilities of what an interactive magazine can do.
However, my personal favourite is the Plex app which allows me to stream content local from my Media Server which was running a Plex server straight to my iPad via transcoding. It does this extremely well and the interface is awesome.
While it is true that I could do all this and with a laptop at similar cost, there is something about the form factor of a tablet that makes it a better experience to read from and interact with.
It feels more like a book that is held and therefore more appropriate and comfortable to use in a living room environment on the sofa or in bed compared to a laptop that has to be standing something (saying that, the iPad 1 is still a little on the heavy side).
There have been times where I did feel a little limited that I couldn’t take some work (such as source code to a game) with me on the move. Although there is the possibility of using remote login apps such as LogMeIn, it isn’t quite the same and would probably only do that if something was urgent.
Also, on extended trips (such as my business trip to Chicago), I tend to take my iMac’s bluetooth keyboard with me as typing anything in length using the on screen keyboard can be very tiring and slow due to the lack of tactile feedback.
After Apple stopped supporting the iPhone 3G, I decided to either move to a Blackberry or Android as I didn’t use many apps beyond the core phone functions, social networking and navigation/maps so buying another iOS device seemed to be a bit pointless.
Overall, I am still very happy with my iPad and have had many hours of watching, reading and playing on it over the past year. It isn’t a laptop replacement, but it was never meant to be, at least not in my eyes.
I see it more of a medium to consume media with and the iPad does that beautifully.
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alixgames posted this
