So I bought my first Apple product with a 64GB 3G iPad on Friday. I left work around 4:05. 15 minutes to get to Best Buy. I was 4th in line out of ~10 by 5:00. $829.99 plus tax minus my $75 in gift cards/reward zone cash. Screen is awesome. Responsiveness is uber. Getting it running and all synced up in iTunes was a piece of cake.
I think the general apps work real well. Linking up our Gmail was a snap. The mail app gets knocked a lot, but I think it works fine. Browsing has been great. Only one site I use regularly (the sony rewards site) uses flash. I can't do the daily questions and stuff on the iPad which kind of sucks.
I synced every type of media (photos, music, movies, podcasts, and tv shows). All worked fine. Photos are a snap. I linked iTunes to a photo folder on the PC. Each subfolder in that folder becomes an album in the Photo app.
I imported all my WMA lossless music into iTunes as 192khz MP3. 70GB of WMA lossless music, not a single file error. Some lost their cover art, but iTunes found it easily. There was one big issue though with the tags. iTunes read the "Contributing Artist" tag as the "Artist". The songs I ripped in DBPowerAmp had some multiple artists in that CA field. So iTunes broke up many albums. All my songs had the "Album Artist" field filled out in the WMAs, but iTunes ignored that completely. All the imported AA fields were blank. It took me about an hour to manually fix up the tags and get everything equalized, but it wasn't a big deal. All the music plays perfect. 15GB of MP3s all on the iPad.
I used Handbrake to encode a rip of "Ferris Beuler's Day Off" for the iPad. I re-encoded an MKV of the movie, which itself was a remux of the movie from DVD. It took maybe an hour to encode and played perfect. I used the normal preset without changing anything. iTunes lets you embed cover art into the movie file, so I added the movie poster and it shows up with the poster in cover flow view on the iPad. I tried to enter a description though and that didnt show on the iPad. Hopefully theres more ways to add meta information to movies and have it present on the iPad.
For the tv shows, I re-encoded 2 AVIs the Marvel Avengers cartoon. They worked fine. Took a little learning in iTunes, but I got them appearing under the TV Show heading with the proper season listing after manually setting the files as TV Shows and setting the meta info. I found importing art for the first episode controls what you see in the series over flow on the iPad so that was nice to be able to use a series poster image.
Podcosts are a piece of cake. iTunes is awesome for that. Set your automatic download rules and auto sync to your device. Ugh, I want this on a phone so bad so I can listen to podcasts at work.
Calendar and contacts synced to our local Outlook with no effort. No issues at all. It actually can sync contacts subfolders too, which our Blackberry phones cannot do.
I played with iBooks and the Kindle app. I think I'll be using Kindle. Salvatore, Martin, Harry Potter, and so on are not on iBooks. They have no real selection. Amazon has almost everything. I found really nothing else iBooks does that the Kindle app doesn't as well. Kindle can do the cool page turning animation. I think the Kindle reading page presentation is also better. Its minimalistic. iBooks has all kinds of controls and stuff around the page youre reading. I'll be buying my first book soon. I think I'm a few books behind Salvatore's releases as Ive held off buying print books for a little while now.
Comic books are just epic on the iPad. I tried a couple of apps. The free Cloudreader app is OK, but its page and book presentation blows. You see edges of the previous and next page instead of blank space against the current page. Its ugly and the turning mechanic is sporadic. I also want to see my available books as more than just a text list. Comic Read Mobi is perma-banned so thats out. Bummer too cause their planned feature to connect a Windows share drive would have been incredible.
So, I settled on ComicZeal. You import your books right through iTunes. It gives you cover flow and automatically groups like titles together as collections (although with some shortcomings which I reported in their developer blog).
Actually reading comic books is just awesome. The screen is that good. Our laptop is 1280x800. So a full page comic presents as roughly 500x800. The vertical height of the iPad screen in portrait mode is roughly the same height as our laptop screen (which is 15.4" 16:10). The iPad shows comic pages at roughly 640x1024 then. That's almost 30% more resolution at the same physical screen size. It makes a HUGE difference. Text on the laptop is fuzzy. Text on the iPad is sharp and clear. I brought up the same book on the iPad and the laptop side by side. It's night and day. Color reproduction on the iPad screen is so much more natural and crisp too. It's amazing.
What else... Played some games. D was playing a puzzle game. I played some Godfinger, which is one of the microtransaction world builder games. It looks nice, but would be boring fairly quickly. I look forward to playing Plants vs Zombies and the other tower defense games. Scrabble is supposed to be great on the iPad too so I plan to check that out.
Men's Health has a great app, but they're charging $4.99 per issue. Ugh thats nuts. They're supposed to have some subscription model coming. Zinio for general magazine reading works well. They offer Home Theater but need more selection. Maximum PC publishes PDF files of each issue for free download right on their web site. I'll be done with print magazines pretty soon.
There are some nice shopping apps. Kayak works well. Ebay and Amazon have apps that seem pretty capable. The news apps are all nice. USA Today is great. WeatherBug is awesome. Im amazed theres no dedicated Facebook iPad app yet.
I didnt actually try the 3G out. I plan to only use that when we travel. The WiFi hooked to our router faster and easier than any wireless device I think Ive used. It seems more stable and reliable than the N connection from our laptop.
I have the interface pages organized by category (misc on the main page, news, reading, games, shopping, audio/video). I look forward to the folders in 4.0. I wish you could label each page with a header text so you could see immediately whats on that page instead of needing to look at the apps first.
The volume and speaker are pretty good. Instant on/off is so nice. Its so much easier to grab the iPad to check the weather or take a look at email than the laptop. Im happy the put a screen lock switch. Laying down last night reading comics, I needed to use it. Battery seems incredible. Used it a bunch yesterday and it still ended the day at 80%. Ill easily get more than the expected 10 hours out of it.
I tried out a free Windows remote desktop app and it connected to our PC perfectly fine, but the features and control were limited. Ill be buying a more feature rich RDP app soon. Im also hoping the wireless sync app gets approved.
I only bought one accessory, the stand. $30, what a joke. You get two things in the box, a very short cable and a plug adapter. The cable has a USB connector, so you use it to sync or you plug it into the adapter for the wall to charge. Its gotta be only 3 feet or so. Luckily we have a table in the living room right in front of a plug. It would be convenient to buy another charging cable, but I dont plan to spend $60 or whatever. Ill just unplug and cart the cable and stand upstairs with me to sync when I need to. If the wireless sync app goes through thatll be a moot point anyway. Im debating an anti-glare screen protector, but Im not sure yet. I will need to buy a slip case or folio sleeve to protect it when we travel.
All in all, Im pleased to far. Im eager to use it more and really get a feel for how it changes my computing activities. Oh, it needs multitasking badly. I started watching the MacBreak Weekly podcast, but I dont want to sit for 2 hours and watch only that show. I want to surf or do something else and have that play in the background.
I think the general apps work real well. Linking up our Gmail was a snap. The mail app gets knocked a lot, but I think it works fine. Browsing has been great. Only one site I use regularly (the sony rewards site) uses flash. I can't do the daily questions and stuff on the iPad which kind of sucks.
I synced every type of media (photos, music, movies, podcasts, and tv shows). All worked fine. Photos are a snap. I linked iTunes to a photo folder on the PC. Each subfolder in that folder becomes an album in the Photo app.
I imported all my WMA lossless music into iTunes as 192khz MP3. 70GB of WMA lossless music, not a single file error. Some lost their cover art, but iTunes found it easily. There was one big issue though with the tags. iTunes read the "Contributing Artist" tag as the "Artist". The songs I ripped in DBPowerAmp had some multiple artists in that CA field. So iTunes broke up many albums. All my songs had the "Album Artist" field filled out in the WMAs, but iTunes ignored that completely. All the imported AA fields were blank. It took me about an hour to manually fix up the tags and get everything equalized, but it wasn't a big deal. All the music plays perfect. 15GB of MP3s all on the iPad.
I used Handbrake to encode a rip of "Ferris Beuler's Day Off" for the iPad. I re-encoded an MKV of the movie, which itself was a remux of the movie from DVD. It took maybe an hour to encode and played perfect. I used the normal preset without changing anything. iTunes lets you embed cover art into the movie file, so I added the movie poster and it shows up with the poster in cover flow view on the iPad. I tried to enter a description though and that didnt show on the iPad. Hopefully theres more ways to add meta information to movies and have it present on the iPad.
For the tv shows, I re-encoded 2 AVIs the Marvel Avengers cartoon. They worked fine. Took a little learning in iTunes, but I got them appearing under the TV Show heading with the proper season listing after manually setting the files as TV Shows and setting the meta info. I found importing art for the first episode controls what you see in the series over flow on the iPad so that was nice to be able to use a series poster image.
Podcosts are a piece of cake. iTunes is awesome for that. Set your automatic download rules and auto sync to your device. Ugh, I want this on a phone so bad so I can listen to podcasts at work.
Calendar and contacts synced to our local Outlook with no effort. No issues at all. It actually can sync contacts subfolders too, which our Blackberry phones cannot do.
I played with iBooks and the Kindle app. I think I'll be using Kindle. Salvatore, Martin, Harry Potter, and so on are not on iBooks. They have no real selection. Amazon has almost everything. I found really nothing else iBooks does that the Kindle app doesn't as well. Kindle can do the cool page turning animation. I think the Kindle reading page presentation is also better. Its minimalistic. iBooks has all kinds of controls and stuff around the page youre reading. I'll be buying my first book soon. I think I'm a few books behind Salvatore's releases as Ive held off buying print books for a little while now.
Comic books are just epic on the iPad. I tried a couple of apps. The free Cloudreader app is OK, but its page and book presentation blows. You see edges of the previous and next page instead of blank space against the current page. Its ugly and the turning mechanic is sporadic. I also want to see my available books as more than just a text list. Comic Read Mobi is perma-banned so thats out. Bummer too cause their planned feature to connect a Windows share drive would have been incredible.
So, I settled on ComicZeal. You import your books right through iTunes. It gives you cover flow and automatically groups like titles together as collections (although with some shortcomings which I reported in their developer blog).
Actually reading comic books is just awesome. The screen is that good. Our laptop is 1280x800. So a full page comic presents as roughly 500x800. The vertical height of the iPad screen in portrait mode is roughly the same height as our laptop screen (which is 15.4" 16:10). The iPad shows comic pages at roughly 640x1024 then. That's almost 30% more resolution at the same physical screen size. It makes a HUGE difference. Text on the laptop is fuzzy. Text on the iPad is sharp and clear. I brought up the same book on the iPad and the laptop side by side. It's night and day. Color reproduction on the iPad screen is so much more natural and crisp too. It's amazing.
What else... Played some games. D was playing a puzzle game. I played some Godfinger, which is one of the microtransaction world builder games. It looks nice, but would be boring fairly quickly. I look forward to playing Plants vs Zombies and the other tower defense games. Scrabble is supposed to be great on the iPad too so I plan to check that out.
Men's Health has a great app, but they're charging $4.99 per issue. Ugh thats nuts. They're supposed to have some subscription model coming. Zinio for general magazine reading works well. They offer Home Theater but need more selection. Maximum PC publishes PDF files of each issue for free download right on their web site. I'll be done with print magazines pretty soon.
There are some nice shopping apps. Kayak works well. Ebay and Amazon have apps that seem pretty capable. The news apps are all nice. USA Today is great. WeatherBug is awesome. Im amazed theres no dedicated Facebook iPad app yet.
I didnt actually try the 3G out. I plan to only use that when we travel. The WiFi hooked to our router faster and easier than any wireless device I think Ive used. It seems more stable and reliable than the N connection from our laptop.
I have the interface pages organized by category (misc on the main page, news, reading, games, shopping, audio/video). I look forward to the folders in 4.0. I wish you could label each page with a header text so you could see immediately whats on that page instead of needing to look at the apps first.
The volume and speaker are pretty good. Instant on/off is so nice. Its so much easier to grab the iPad to check the weather or take a look at email than the laptop. Im happy the put a screen lock switch. Laying down last night reading comics, I needed to use it. Battery seems incredible. Used it a bunch yesterday and it still ended the day at 80%. Ill easily get more than the expected 10 hours out of it.
I tried out a free Windows remote desktop app and it connected to our PC perfectly fine, but the features and control were limited. Ill be buying a more feature rich RDP app soon. Im also hoping the wireless sync app gets approved.
I only bought one accessory, the stand. $30, what a joke. You get two things in the box, a very short cable and a plug adapter. The cable has a USB connector, so you use it to sync or you plug it into the adapter for the wall to charge. Its gotta be only 3 feet or so. Luckily we have a table in the living room right in front of a plug. It would be convenient to buy another charging cable, but I dont plan to spend $60 or whatever. Ill just unplug and cart the cable and stand upstairs with me to sync when I need to. If the wireless sync app goes through thatll be a moot point anyway. Im debating an anti-glare screen protector, but Im not sure yet. I will need to buy a slip case or folio sleeve to protect it when we travel.
All in all, Im pleased to far. Im eager to use it more and really get a feel for how it changes my computing activities. Oh, it needs multitasking badly. I started watching the MacBreak Weekly podcast, but I dont want to sit for 2 hours and watch only that show. I want to surf or do something else and have that play in the background.