An Insightful iPad Review by Anne Kirschner

A couple of days ago, I ran across an insightful iPad review by Anne Kirschner, a dean at City University of NY. Her iPad experience closely matches mine. Here are some of my thoughts:

  • The move from the morning paper to reviewing the news on the iPad, make breakfast a much more pleasant experience, because of the smaller and more easily managed iPad form factor.  I actually do a lot of my “newspaper” reading in bed now.
  • When used in meetings, it gives you the ability to take electronic notes and consult the web for meeting related material, with out “barricading yourself behind a screen.”  For me this has made a huge difference, especially now that the novelty of the iPad is wearing off and more people have them in meetings.
  • When traveling, it’s 10 hour battery life makes long flights more endurable as I can watch movies I really want to watch, or play games while in the air.
  • The 10 hour battery life means that I don’t need to recharge it during the day, and often I go 3 or 4 days between charging.
  • Reading using the Kindle reader is a joy. I especially appreciate being able to go back and forth between my iPad and iPod and the Kindle app knowing where I left off on the other device (this work across all Kindle apps and devices).

What I’m hoping gets fixed in version 4 of the iPad OS:

  • One of the main drawbacks is it’s limited ability to multi-task that we’ve become accustomed to on laptops.  Copy and pasting text or an image from a web page just takes a lot longer.
  • One other drawback is the iPad’s current inability to sync files from your desktop computer, or from some cloud based system.  If I could have 2 way syncing of some of my DropBox floders I would be a very happy man.
  • This is not a big issue, but I’d love to be able to output the contents of the screen via the Apple VGA dongle, from every application, not just Keynote.

That’s it for know… You should really read Anne’s article for all the interesting details she includes.

3 comments

  1. Just don’t spill coffee or jam on your iPad at breakfast. The newspaper can tolerate it; not sure if your iPad can. 🙂

    I remember a scene in “Minority Report” which came out in 2002 where passengers on a bus (or some kind of bus-like transportation device) were reading digital newspapers. That was a mere 8 years ago and the iPad is not terrible far off from Spielberg’s fantasy.

  2. I actually do most of my reading in bed, so coffee & jam are not a big issue for me. I did however sustain a minor injury while reading my iPad in bed soon after I bought it. I was lying in my bed on my side, resting the edge of the iPad on the bed and holding it upright with my hand… The iPad slipped out of my and hit me on the head.

    This probably says more about my personal clumsiness than how dangerous iPads really are though. 😉

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