Learning to Love the iPad
I have to admit I’ve always been a bit skeptical of Apple product releases. The removal of the mouse button on the MacBook, the iPhone with a terrible camera and weird lockdown environment, and most recently the iPad. These and more are things that have made me view new product releases thinking that Steve Jobs has finally lost it and is going to release a giant dud, a useless product.
But I’ve eventually changed my mind in all these circumstances and found that the compromises that appear as glaring drawbacks are in fact necessary steps to make leaps ahead in product design.
The iPad is one where it has taken me a little time to adjust to the leap forward. There are a lot of problems with the iPad. It has no camera, the sound is not the best, the resolution is fairly poor, pixel doubling is a joke, safari mobile is not at the desktop level, the battery replacement is $100, typing on it is a challenge, it’s locked down like the iPhone, it doesn’t have a way to deal with files between apps, it’s not the lightest, it’s a smudgy mess after a single use, you have to prop it up to use it, I could go on a long time.
But these problems miss the point. The point of the iPad is that it offers the same greatness of the iPhone, for times when you are a bit less on the move. It’s a new way to think about computing - if laptops are the portable evolution of the desktop computer, the iPad is the desktop evolution of the portable phone.
The steps to loving an iPad are as follows:
- think about the hassle the experience of having a laptop in cafes and around the house or really is: power, heat, size, weight, internet connectivity are all significant issues.
- think, can you use your laptop while you are driving to someplace to find directions? Can you use it in the supermarket to remember what to buy? There are a ton of things only a truly from the ground up mobile device makes painless.
- get unlimited 3g for the iPad, stop worrying about wifi passwords and hotspots
- get apps that complement the iPad, not ports of iphone apps. Ex: crossword puzzles and scrabble, iBooks and kindle, air video to remote play videos over your network, epicurious and cookbooks, games made for iPad only. Spend money, the iPad market is too new for great freebies.
- forget about your battery life anxiety. 10% = at least 1 hour, an overnight charge lasts the whole day easily.
- get Apple’s black iPad case that can prop up the iPad if you are typing or want it to stand up by itself.
- get the biggest storage available so you don’t have to think about it
- rethink the tasks you do, reorganize the way you work to fit your mobile friendly tasks into time that you are mobile.
It’s a huge shift, no doubt, and somewhat worrying considering the stranglehold monopoly Apple seems to have now on the future of computing, but ignore the iPad at your loss.
