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iPad capabilities? On line bill pay and flash.. problems?

mojohanna

mojohanna

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 7, 2004
868
0
Cleveland
Ok, so my "household" laptop died this morning. Its an old powerbook G4 17". I think it is probably the HD that died. Don't think it is worth fixing.

My question is, my wife uses this for email, web, facebook, paying bills. I know the ipad can do all of the above, my only concern is the online bill paying. Some we do via our bank's site, others we do on that particular vendor's site. Is flash a common tool used in any of the payment type pages? If this won't work, I am going to be looking at a macbook or an refurb.

Thanks!
 
Without knowing what sites you need to use, I can only suggest you install "click2flash" and disable flash. Then goto the sites you need. If they work, them the iPad will work, if you see a grey box with "FLASH" in the middle then the iPad will not be able to access that info.
 
Even if your bank does use flash on an online banking site, they should have a text only version that doesn't. Flash causes problems for screen readers (which is how some visually impaired people use a computer), and in the UK at least, there are legal guidelines in place which mean companies have to make their services accessible to such people. I understand there are similar guidelines in the US.

In the UK, I can tell you that Nationwide and Halifax don't use flash for online banking, and I very much doubt any of the other banks do either because of the accessibility issue. Fwiw. Paypal, ebay, and nochex all don't use flash either. Other than that, all you can do is take the advice of the previous poster. Or grab an iphone form somewhere and give the site a try - if it's flash, it won't work obviously. There may also be an iphone (and thus ipad) app out there for your particular type of bank or vendor.
 
CIBC just launched their own iPhone app here in Canada and I thought I saw one or two for the USA market as well.

The bank that I use, PC Financial, loads just fine and was able to access on my iPhone. Why not walk into an Apple Store and try it on one of iPhones there? Obviously you don't need to login in, just see if the site is accessible.
 
No flash on my bank.

Really I wouldn't expect any bank to use flash, it has a history of security problems.
 
None of my banks use Flash, only Javascript, which is supported in the iPad. Safe thing to do would be to call your banks tech support and ask them though. Also a lot of banks have or are coming out with iPhone apps.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7E18 Safari/528.16)

What does your wife do on facebook? A lot of the apps on FB are flash.
 
Maybe take your wife to an Apple store where she can play with it for a while and see if it does everything she needs.

But I'm pretty sure it will do what you listed.
 
Facebook has its own app, and its website when accessed from mobile Safari automatically loads an iPhone friendly version. I think its even better than the app!

The only thing to watch out for on facebook is 3rd party "games" and "applications" like where you have to make someone a zombie or grow your own farm. If that's what she uses on facebook, then it won't work with the iPad as it doesn't work with the iPhone now.

Messaging, adding friends, stalking people's profiles, etc. all will work fine though. :)
 
Several banks have apps as well.

BofA, BBVA and several others.

Website owners want to make sure their websites are usable by their customers. So if you do for some reason run into a web site with flash contact them now and ask them if they intend to provide a flash counterpart in the next few months.

It is bad business to support flash these days. The CTO of Virgin Airlines came out just recently saying they are removing flash from their site because it would be foolish to make their site inaccessible to their customers who would be using a device like the iPad. Especially since they can do all the things they need to do via HTML.

There is really no excuse for any business to not have a flash free version of their site. I think the advice others have given to install click2flash is a good one to find out what sites you regularly use require flash. Then from there you can contact them and suggest to them or ask them when they will have a non-flash version of their site available.

Given the amount of money and effort most websites spend to get traffic, blowing off 100 million internet capable devices seems pretty foolish.
 
Wirelessly posted (iPhone 3GS: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7E18 Safari/528.16)

The ipad will run all iPhone apps with a larger screen besides the browser. BofA and Wells Fargo and more have apps designed for these touch devices and more will come. I expect these dedicated apps to be nicer then the standard browser interface.
 
Thanks for the suggestions. While she uses FB pretty much daily, she is not a farmer, mafioso, or any of the other silly games on FB (can't say the same for myself). Just the basic keeping in touch type thing on FB.

We did plan to check it out before hand. My thought is that since she does not do a lot of heavy lifting that an ipad would work well for her.

She does need some very light word processing. Seems like pages could handle that. But how would you print? send the file to a printer wirelessly? Send it to a second computer in the house?
 
mojohanna said:
My question is, my wife uses this for email, web, facebook, paying bills. I know the ipad can do all of the above...
Click to expand...

Unless she wants to do all of that from the couch the majority of the time, don't replace a laptop with an iPad.
 
FrankieTDouglas said:
But, wait... "the best internet browsing experience"?
Click to expand...

I'm with you. I've owned tablet PC's and surfing on a tablet can indeed be an awesome experience. But not with a browser that has trouble with a lot of sites in its full form and in this case is offered without java, plug-ins etc.

I'm sure folks who browse sites that don't have issues with Safari, don't use JAVA, and don't need FLASH or REAL or any one one of a dozen other popular plugins needed by many sites will love the iPAD.

Unfortunately I'm not one of those and would not buy a device for surfing that did not support these things. In this case I think Steve has been drinking too much of his own koolaid. People kind of expect these limitations on many cell phones, but on a device touted as "having the best internet browsing experience" I think there is going to be a lot of disappointment.
 
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