Happy iPad Owner

I am not normally prone to purchasing the first generation of any product, but for the past two weeks, I have been a happy iPad owner. I’m sure most of you have already seen or read numerous iPad reviews, so I won’t dive into all of the features the iPad offers. Instead I’ll simply share a few initial experiences and thoughts on what this device is and can become.

First and foremost, the iPad is not a laptop computer. It is more of a consumption device than a content creation device. (Odd I would say that since I’m writing this on my iPad with the built-in Notes app.). If you regularly use external USB or FireWire peripherals, or need constant access to a CD/DVD drive, the iPad is not for you. But if you have a laptop and use it mostly for email, web surfing, catching up on news, social media or watching movies, you may want to give the iPad a shot. Going into my purchase, I expected the iPad to perform well in those areas, and it has. At a minimum, I’ve been using mine for those purposes every day. But the real reason for my purchase was to experience the potential of the device. Fortunately, from day one, there were apps available to showcase that potential. One of my early favorites is StarWalk, which uses the iPad’s internal compass to properly display the current location of stars, constellations and planets. I can’t tell you how much I wished this technology was available when I took my astronomy courses back in college. From that moment, I realized the success of this device, and other tablets on the market, are representative of a fundamental shift on how humans will interact with computers. How fast that shift occurs will be driven by the quality of applications that are created for these devices.

I recently had the opportunity to give a presentation using Apple Keynote on the iPad. Using an optional Apple Dock Connector to VGA cord, the iPad instantly recognized the projector.  That’s the good part. The bad is that the external video is only active when you either start playback of a Keynote presentation, or during playback of a video. I wish it would simply show me a mirror image of what’s on the iPad screen all the time (like we saw during Apple’s iPad announcement a few weeks back.) But, I’m not sure if this first version even contains the graphic horsepower to accomplish this. Since I do not make presentations very often, it’s not that big of a letdown.

One of the highly publicized drawbacks of the iPad is its inability to run Flash. Apple says Flash takes up too many processing resources and I have to agree. Recently I was viewing a webinar that used Adobe® Acrobat® Connect™ Professional software. On the surface, it’s a very cool application for conducting webinars, but 15 minutes into the presentation, all attendees were complaining about the audio and video constantly dropping out and buffering. I also noticed that the fans on my dual quad-core MacPro would run faster when the buffering stopped and the presentation resumed playing. A quick check of my Mac’s system activity monitor told the tale. Just playing the streaming audio from the presentation increased the processor load by 20%. Yikes! No wonder Apple is reluctant to allow Flash on their devices. Battery life alone would be lowered significantly. When using my iPad, I can honestly say I haven’t missed Flash at all, primarily because many of the sites I visit that had contained Flash video have been redesigned to use HTML 5. I don’t need Flash. Hear that Adobe, I do not need Flash.

Many a critic has said, “well it doesn’t do this or it can’t do that.”  The iPad wasn’t designed to do everything and that’s the point. Think about it. Do you own a single device that does everything you want? Probably not. What the iPad was designed to do it does quite well. As a first generation device, this thing rocks!

Sent from my iPad