One Week With the iPad

I’ve been using my iPad for a lit­tle over a week now, so it’s time for some impres­sions. Before read­ing onward, it might be a good idea to read a pre­vi­ous post of mine where I laid out my poten­tial use cases for an iPad. Much has been writ­ten con­cern­ing the pros and cons of the var­i­ous iPad con­fig­u­ra­tions. Ultimately I ended up pre-ordering a 32 GB WiFi+3G model.

I chose 32 GB as a com­pro­mise between the low end and high end mod­els. In regards to stor­age, I have far too much media to ever hope that a mobile device would be suf­fi­cient to han­dle it, and I already carry a 16 GB iPhone 3G with 8 GB ded­i­cated to music. Instead I cre­ated a 2 GB smart playlist based on my iPhone playlist to sync to the iPad.

I ulti­mately chose to wait for a 3G model in order to max­i­mize flex­i­bil­ity. Given the very rea­son­able pric­ing of the AT&T data plans, it just makes sense to pur­chase the 3G mod­els if you can afford it (not that I can afford any of this)

So, the burn­ing ques­tion is: what do I think of e iPad now that I’ve had a chance to use it? I’m not going to give an in-depth review, as that has been done to death. Instead I want to com­ment on a few areas that have stood out to me.

The first area that I’d like to com­ment on is iBooks. As I men­tioned in the afore-linked post, read­ing on the iPad is some­thing that I was extremely inter­ested in. After a week of read­ing on the iPad I have to con­clude that, as an e-reader, the iPad is a qual­i­fied success.

To pro­vide some back­ground I was an early adopter of e-reading. I have an exten­sive library of ebooks, mainly from Barnes and Noble and their sub­sidiary Fictionwise. I have read those e-books using soft­ware run­ning on Palm PDAs, Mac OS and the iPhone. The iPad trumps all those devices.

I decided, even before I received my iPad, that I wanted to avoid using mul­ti­ple dif­fer­ent e-reader appli­ca­tions on the iPad. Happily I have been suc­cess­ful in that goal. My e-book library ini­tially con­tained approx­i­mately 400 titles already avail­able in DRM-free EPUB for­mat. The remain­ing 150 or so titles were in var­i­ous dif­fer­ent DRM encum­bered vari­ants of the MobiPocket and Fictionwise/Barnes & Noble eReader for­mats. A bit of judi­cious googling will reveal sim­ple meth­ods of remov­ing the DRM from those for­mats. (Note: The legal­ity of remov­ing DRM may vary based on loca­tion. This is not a rec­om­men­da­tion to do so.) Once that is done they may be con­verted into EPUB with the truly hor­ri­fy­ing open-source pro­gram Calibre. Once in non-DRMed EPUB for­mat, trans­fer­ring to iBooks on the iPad is as sim­ple as drag­ging the EPUB files into the Library in iTunes and con­fig­ur­ing the appro­pri­ate sync setting.

I do have to agree with those that claim that the iPad is not a per­fect replace­ment for ded­i­cated e-readers. No one in their right mind would claim that the iPad’s LCD screen is bet­ter for read­ing text than the e-ink screens in the Kindle or Nook. However, I’d like to see some­one play Plants vs. Zombies on a Kindle.

That takes us to an area that I had hon­estly not even con­sid­ered when debat­ing whether to pur­chase an iPad: gam­ing. I’m not much into gam­ing to begin with, but I’ve always car­ried a few games on my iPhone in order to pass the time. On the iPad, though, gam­ing truly shines. The larger screen makes even pixel-doubled games more enjoy­able to play than on the iPhone.

Another task that I’m enjoy­ing on the iPad is watch­ing video. Shows that I’ve pur­chased through iTunes, YouTube and Netflix have all worked flawlessly.

Finally, I’d like to com­ment on the final task that I antic­i­pated using the iPad for, blog­ging. I sup­pose that the best com­men­tary on this topic is the fact that this post has been pri­mar­ily writ­ten on the iPad using the Blogpress app. It ain’t per­fect, but it’s doable. Hopefully Automatic will update their WordPress app to be actu­ally usable (seri­ously, no copy and paste?). Or, ven bet­ter would be MarsEdit for the iPad. One can only hope.

At any rate, there you have it. My ram­bling thoughts after one week of iPad own­er­ship. Maybe I’ll revisit this in a few months when the pow­dered uni­corn horn in the case wears off.

Pre-publishing update:

I (wisely) chose to check this post in WordPress’ web edi­tor before the final pub­lish. The for­mat­ting as sent by Blogpress was hor­ri­ble. Seriously, some­one needs to make a decent blog­ging tool for the iPad.