Yeah, I got an iPad.
My main use for an iPad is for the things it’s very good at: My kids watch videos and play games on it, I read books and news and watch baseball games. It’s good for email, great for internet, and you already know all that.
One of the things I had hoped, though, is that I could use it for “real” work: Word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations, using Apple’s iWork apps. Having taken a look at two of the three: Not so much.
Don’t expect the iPad versions of Pages or Keynote to be very useful. These are not the full-fledged versions that Jobs sold them as; they’re stripped down mobile versions, missing critical features. They have a limited number of fonts. (Pages doesn’t have Times New Roman, which is about as basic as you can find. I take it back; Times New Roman is there. But when I imported a document in, I got an error message saying that it didn’t have the font Times New Roman. No idea why. Symbol is not there, which is a definite problem for people working with alpha-herpesviruses or alpha-beta T cells and so on.) They can’t handle some media types. I don’t know which ones, but a simple presentation I imported into Keynote was riddled with question marks where it couldn’t render images.
(I see that Chris Anderson at The Unofficial Apple Weblog reaches the same conclusion about Keynote.)
The various ways for syncing documents are clumsy and awkward. I am still hoping that there will be some kind of shared folder eventually that, say, Dropbox can use; but for now you have to drag things back and forth individually.
If you start a document on the iPad, I’m sure it will look fine. But if you have some documents on your computer, and you’re thinking you’ll be able to use the iPad to work on them down at the coffee shop or on your deck, don’t be too confident.
It’s not a dealbreaker for me, but if you need an iPad for real work, don’t count on this release of iWorks.
[…] Check Designing for the iPad My iPad Adventure So Far iPad and behavior: some personal observations iPad for science? Not yet Need For iPad: Undercover Laptop […]
Maybe not for creating. But for digesting science content – eg learning – it's terrific. Imagine every science textbook on the iPad. Complete with links, videos, etc. Science podcasts, both audio and video. Technique videos. The possibilities are endless for teaching. iPad and the imitators will revolutionize teaching of all kinds.
I wrote a blog article expressing a similar point “The iPad: A device to consume, not produce” (linked on my name). I think this concept (David Pogue's not mine!) is critical to understanding the iPad.
It will be very interesting to see if it makes a difference in the textbook market. Here's hoping. (I've written a little on this too.) Apparently one university in the USA is offering every new student an iPad. I can imagine textbook publishers trying to do the maths on that. (Yes, maths, not math; I'm not American.)
I agree, there’s huge potential here and Im looking forward to seeing how things progress.
Meanwhile, it’s not quite as bad for creating as all that. I took the pad with me to my son’s soccer practice and sat on the little plastic bleachers writing for 45 minutes while 11 6- year-olds ran in circles orbiting the ball. The keyboard is surprisingly efficient, especially with the very effective spell correction. Not nearly as fast as on a real keyboard, but much faster than the iphone. Definitely fine for putting down first drafts.
(Edit: There's also something funky, apparently, with the iPad's interaction with WordPress comments. I posted this via iPad, and it didn't seem to play nice with the Disqus commenting plugin. Something to figure out.)
I picture labs techs walking around with ipads in a few years. Maybe the 2015 ipad will be completely clear like the ones in Avatar.
As a step toward the interactive science education iPad apps the future will bring, let me call attention to my app, OnScreen DNA Lite, a virtual model of the double helix with a number of options to impress the structure and molecular components of DNA on the mind, including the notion of handedness. The touch screen makes it fun.
I'm glad I read your post, I was considering getting one as a mini-netbook, but now realize it's not there yet as far as easy document editing. Oh well, hopefully by this time next year the NEW ipad will have more features that people need to use it for actual work.
oops! forgot the link:
http://mbpgsu.ca/2010/05/ipad
oops! forgot the link:
http://mbpgsu.ca/2010/05/ipad
You bring up some great points about iWork, but look at the device as a whole and throw in some other great science apps and you have a winner.
Have a look at my review on 60 days of iPad in Academia. You'll learn of at least 6 things you could do with the device that makes it a perfect fit in Academia.