It’s been a year since I sold my kidneys for an iPad. It’s been fun. It has replaced every other device I own (ie, a couple of PCs and the nexus one). It’s an outright winner, when it comes to reading, especially long-form articles, and books alike. It has become my go-to machine for everyday news, twitter/facebook, and even for browsing my favorite photographers.
It have however remained strictly in the realm of content consumption — until now. In the last few days, I’ve added a stylus – the Targus iPad stylus (available quite readily at most ‘best-buy’s, and on Amazon), and the iPad’s camera connect kit. If you own an iPad (v1 or v2) I would recommend that you fork out the moolah for these two. It will be the best $50 you’ll ever spend on accessories for the iPad. Forget the cool looking smart cover. These will be more rewarding than the 2 hours of thrill of watching the smart cover turn off the ipad when you close it.
The targus stylus is without doubt the best one in the market yet. It’s got good heft to it. Feels comfortable to hold. The only gripe I have with the Targus is the length. I can’t but wonder why they didn’t make it same as a standard pencil.
There is no contest between this, and the Pogo Sketch. (Ten-one design could be the next Wacom, if they get their pressure sensitive stylus right. Wacom should buy them out, now, before they get too big). The targus has an air-filled bubble for the tip, which slides with less resistance against the iPad’s screen, than the spongy one of the pogo sketch. The tip is still fairly large, and the level of control you get varies by the app. If you use Penultimate, this stylus will provide much better control. The iPad can now actually replace paper & pen (somewhat). I can’t wait to see how good the Wacomstylusis going to be. It will definitely cost more (around $40 if I’m right), but for $20, this is the best stylus (that is also readily available) right now.
The camera connect kit, is a thing of marvel. It is not like Apple to allow such a wide range of applications for a single piece of plastic (even if it is over-priced for something that should be part of the iPad purchase). I just found out that it works quite well with my camera (a Canon 7D). Importing RAW images onto the iPad are faster than importing them on my MacbookPro (something seriously out-of-whack here — I’ll need to investigate, to confirm this). It also allows connecting any “Mac” supported keyboard (I’m typing this post on my logitech USB Wave keyboard, which I must say kicks the pants off any keyboard Apple currently sells). Of course, carrying a keyboard around is out of question, but it’s nice to know it works without any special drivers.
Tip: Both Ctrl+shift+arrows (begin/end of line), and Cmd+shift+arrows (1-word at a time) allow you to select text on iPad. of course, you can navigate around the text, if you don’t use shift. No, someone needs to port vim to iOS. That would be awesome.
The killer combo of the week, was a little hard to choose. Here are two:
Targus Stylus + Penultimate
Blogsy + iPad Camera connect kit + Logitech Wave keyboard
Photosmith looks like a promising app. Currently, it is metadata management and import app, that syncs with Lightroom via Wifi. $20 is quite reasonable for an app that will allow automatic import into lightroom. However, I’m unconvinced with the design. I wish they would provide better selection capabilities. I’d buy it in a heartbeat, if they allowed multi-select+tagging or some kind of paint interface that can apply a group of tag+collection info that I define.
This is a test post from blogsy, an iPad blogging tool.
The interface design looks thoughtful — drag & drop of images from flickr and picasa, videos from YouTube, a built it google search and browser to get at other content. Although there is a bit of a learning curve, it makes the iPad a true content generation device.
Maybe this will keep me blogging this time around. On that note, here’s a cutie pie to bring a smile to you, today.
If you weren’t in a hole the past few days, you would have heard about the iPad 2 launch. Here’s Conan’s take on it.
I must say, the cover is a thing of engineering beauty. Kudos on that, Apple, and thanks for screwing over several thousands of your iPad 1 customers, who forked up 9.5 Billion in revenue in 9 months.
I did it. I saidIwouldn’t. I said I will hold out for purely ethical reasons, but it is very hard to resist the iPad. The first impression in-store is simply — awesome. This of course is not a surprise and is something that one can expect from apple these days.
Warning: This is a long post ..
Here are some thoughts, after a day of use:
It’s fast. Much faster than the iPhone 3GS. This is good news for the upcoming iPhone.
The battery lasts a really long time. It was around 80% and I used it for incessantly until it died 7/8 hours later. The a4 processor is at this point THE chip to kill for. If you have any samsung shares, I would dump them now, and load up on apple (although they are a tad pricy these days)
iPhone apps are useless and look ugly on the iPad. Don’t bother synching any of them
The keyboard is a lot more usable that I thought it would be. I’m typing this post at about 60-70% of my usual typing speed. (Only true if inclined at an proper angle — the perfect angle: the one you get with the iPad case).
Other small annoyances include URL copy pasting between apps, and how the app store lists apps. Exiting the app store every time I install an app is also mind-numbing. I know I can use a Mac and install all apps at one go, but I didn’t spend a 1000 dollars for workarounds.
Although I could type very well, creating a blog post is not this device’s forte. For one, all the switching back and forth, is a nightmare, and there is simply no way to get the links to apps for instance from the ipad. Adding images is a pain as well (which is why this is a purely text-only post). It is really nice until you want to go beyond its function as a consumption device. Even a little, and it makes you want to get to a mac/pc in a hurry.
Some apps are just stellar, that make it worthwhile go through the above mentioned niggles.
I don’t feel any remorse at having bought it, but at the same time, I’m not floored by everything either. That is actually the strength of the device. It is the first time a computing device completely disappears and you interact with data. The experience depends on the app that you are using. Instapaper does a great job, so does the gmail web app.
I’m not a fan of the drop list widget though. This is the one interface element that gets in the way, and frankly, I’m surprised that this got through the apple ui designers. A sliding in from left/right would have been a better option.
I’m a little cautious about buying a lot of apps like I did for the iPhone and then quitting the platform although I don’t see that happening with the iPad, there is no competition in sight for at least another 18 months, and even then it would take an androId tablet a year to get to this level of refinement (if they ever do)
If you are a still here, here are some must have apps. Most of them are free, so get ‘em now:
