For my birthday a couple of months ago, my husband bought me
a Wi-Fi iPad. I'd intended to wait a few more months to get one --
first-generation electronics are often plagued with bugs that get
smoothed out of later releases -- but I wasn't about to turn the gift
down when Gary unveiled it at the house.
Overall, I've been extremely happy with the iPad, and it's been serving admirably as a replacement for my laptop.
That's one of the first things
people ask: "Will the iPad replace my laptop?" For me, the answer is
"yes." I've only used my laptop on trips, and despite my best
intentions, I don't tend to do a lot of heavy writing on the road. The
things I've used my laptop for -- web surfing, watching movies on the
plane or in the car, answering email, taking notes, light manuscript
editing -- the iPad's been great for. Even better, since it weighs far
less than a standard laptop, I'm inclined to actually carry it around
with me instead of leaving it behind in my hotel room.
Clearly, I'm not a power user when
it comes to laptops. But editor Michael Knost is, and he told me that
he uses his iPad for most everything with the aid of the LogMeIn Ignition
app, which lets you access and use any of the programs on your Mac or
PC from your iPad. So that app might be a solution for those of you
who want to use programs like Photoshop or Adobe InDesign on the road. (Obviously, if you crave a hackable OS and complete control over your computing environment, the iPad probably isn't for you.)
The second question I get is, "Can
you really type on that thing?" Yes, I can! I haven't had any
significant problems typing on my iPad, and so I haven't yet explored
peripherals like the keyboard dock or the Apple camera kit (which will
enable you to connect a low-power USB keyboard). It's easiest to type
in landscape mode, but even then the onscreen keyboard isn't close to
full sized, so letters are on one screen and you toggle a second screen
to get to letters and punctuation. There's certainly a learning curve,
but I haven't found it onerous (as always, your mileage may vary). The lack of tactile key response is a
bit strange, so I find the keyboard clicky noises (which some other
people find annoying and turn off) helpful in knowing if I've made
contact or not. In portrait mode, the keyboard is so small that thumb
typing works best.
The programs I use for writing
are the built-in Notes app and Pages, Pages is Apple's Word .doc
editing program. Pages takes a little getting used to, and it lacks a
full suite of fonts and the more advanced features of Word, but for
light editing and document reading it's been very handy. So far it's
been well worth the $10 the app costs.
I've loaded my iPad with
electronic copies of my novels and collections, along with electronic advance copies of books I've been asked to review and blurb. I've been doing more reading than I have in several years, and it's been great not having to
haul around paper copies (especially the galleys of books in production, a single one of which is usually the equivalent of hauling around an entire ream of paper). I've also been doing my last bunch of public readings from the iPad. At the Ohioana Book Festival,
when the audience said "Tell us a scary story!" I was able to kill the
lights and read to them in the dark, my face spookily lit.
The laptops I've owned have always
seemed too heavy and awkward to use in readings, so reading from
electronic copy is a new thing for me. At 1.5 pounds, the iPad has the
same heft as a Dan Simmons hardback but without the bulk. It's not too
heavy, and it feels fine in my hands; some people have complained about
the edges feeling "sharp" but I haven't experienced that. Others have
also complained about it feeling slippery, and again, I haven't had any
problems holding onto mine. But of course there are a variety of
glovelike silicone sleeves on the market to reduce
sharpness/slipperiness etc.
You will have to spend some time
wiping off your iPad screen every so often; oil-resistant is not the
same as oil-proof. The iPad should have come bundled with a microfiber
cleaning cloth, but it didn't; I've been using the one that came
bundled with my old flatscreen iMac. I did stress-test mine by eating
French fries and then typing up some notes; salty fry grease wasn't any
harder to get off than regular fingerprints.
Another thing that doesn't come with the iPad is a carrying case. Initially, I got an inexpensive Targus Crave bag
at our local MicroCenter; the bag is fairly well-padded and it's a
good size for the iPad plus a few extras like my change purse, cell
phone, and other odds and ends. I carried the bag as a purse
replacement for a week or so, but when I took it to a local convention
I found it just a little too small to carry everything I needed to
have on hand (most notably, my hairbrush). Also, while the sides of the
bag are well-padded, the bottom edge is not, so you'll want to be
careful setting the bag down.
Because of the size issue and the
protection flaw, I did some online searching and found a Baggallini Sydney bag on sale; the back slip-pocket on the thing is a good size for an iPad encased in a neoprene sleeve (or a fitted case like the Macally Bookstand). I've been using that as my everyday purse since then, and it's worked out well.
Apple's free e-book reader, iBooks,
is a really nice piece of software, and after a recent upgrade it lets you import your own PDFs and Epub files, which lets you get around the relatively high prices in the iBooks store.
But for the first couple of months, you couldn't import PDFs into iBooks, and the iPad version of Safari, which read PDFs just fine from the start, wouldn't let you save them off the web. I solved this
annoying problem fairly quickly by downloading the free CloudReaders
app, which is a very decent PDF reader which makes it easy to upload
ebooks to your iPad using iTunes. A competing PDF reader, Goodreader,
got better ratings and might handle very large PDFs better but
Goodreader irritatingly requires a wireless connection for upload and
download, and both my work and home computers lack wireless access. The buck I spent on Goodreader is the only money I feel I've wasted in the app store so far.
The
needs-wireless-for-file-transfer issue plagues many otherwise good
apps. For instance, I used iTalk Lite to record some of Gary's readings,
and the application was easy to use and the quality of the recording is
great. The problem is, the app doesn't give me a way to download the
resulting audio files using the iPad's USB connector. I have to use a
second desktop application to transfer the files over WiFi, and I can't
get it to work. Trying to get access to the iTalk audio files has
been the single most frustrating thing about the whole iPad experience.
I'm hoping the developer will wise up and enable USB file transfer in
iTunes.
The iTunes file transfer works
really well in the apps that have enabled it. Pages and CloudReaders
both transfer files quickly and easily. Sometimes if you download an
app while you have the iPad plugged in, you have to disconnect and then
re-mount the iPad to get the app to transfer, but that's a fairly
minor issue.
The iPad has become part of my everyday routine in ways that neither my laptop or
my iPods ever did. There's certainly room for improvement, but since
the vast majority of the problems are software issues rather than
hardware issues, I'm hopeful that Apple and the various software
developers will address them in coming months as they addressed the PDF issue in iBooks.
ETA: if you're a bathtub reader, fear not: all you have to do is put your iPad in a big Ziploc bag to protect it against wet hands and splashes. For video proof of concept, see: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/06/how-to-make-a-waterproof-kitchen-proof-ipad-case-and-stand/