On the road with only an ipad for these purposes?

[kmarketing]

Hi,

I'm really interested in getting an ipad, but am trying to learn as much as I can about it. Currently, I have my netbook with osx that I use as my portable. I know there's a heated debate as to which may be better, but I wouldn't mind having both

I do wonder though if I would have to take both with me on a trip, or could I just take the ipad.

My primary uses would be:
Surfing the web
email
Music
Movies
Office
Manipulating documents and files from my wireless network (when I'm at home)
Printing through my wireless printer at home

Mainly on the road:
Transferring my digital camera photos onto my portable.
Transferring video from my camcorder onto my portable.
Editing a website.

What do you think? Can the ipad serve as the only portable that I would need to take?

Thanks!

 

[ndalum]

Does the website you edit use Flash?

If not, I would say yes.

 

[Hellishness]

one thing to remember: iphone os is not extremely stable, and the iPad is very new, so if it crashes on your trip, you could lose all your pics and video.

 

[iCheddar]

, so if it crashes on your trip, you could lose all your pics and video.

I'll agree with this a bit. I had something similar happen to my iPhone a month or so back. I was just about to head out on a ten hour drive back home, when my tomtom app froze up and my iPhone refused to reboot. I ended up having to drive to an Apple store to get it to work again. Ugh!

 

[r0k]

Hi,

I'm really interested in getting an ipad, but am trying to learn as much as I can about it. Currently, I have my netbook with osx that I use as my portable. I know there's a heated debate as to which may be better, but I wouldn't mind having both

I do wonder though if I would have to take both with me on a trip, or could I just take the ipad.

My primary uses would be:
Surfing the web
email
Music
Movies
Office
Manipulating documents and files from my wireless network (when I'm at home)
Printing through my wireless printer at home

Mainly on the road:
Transferring my digital camera photos onto my portable.
Transferring video from my camcorder onto my portable.
Editing a website.

What do you think? Can the ipad serve as the only portable that I would need to take?

Thanks!

I would not want to use an iPad for transferring pix on the road, mostly cuz I have a 16 gig model and an 8 gig sd card in my camera.

I would, however love to be able to transfer pix through my iPad to the cloud from a wifi hotspot. I could stick em on my idisk till I got home.

Editing web sites, eh? How do you edit said web sites? There isn't any iWeb, Dreamweaver, TacoHTML, etc on the iPad. If you are editing them through web based forms or even in a shell, then the iPad is all you need.

Note that for Office docs, you will need third party software to get files on and off your iPad. I have several. I finally settled on the moderately expensive Air Sharing HD. I also have filebrowser and mobilestudio. Total out of pocket for these 3 is $15. I really want Apple to provide Finder for the iPad. This is a must for the thing to reach its potential for doing stuff on the road even if all or most of the files live in the cloud.

Note that none of the above apps can see each other's files. This means the file system is hidden away from apps and the only area files can all see is the "photo roll". If I run Pages and tell it to save a file locally, I can't see it from any other app. If I copy a file to the device using Air Sharing and once it's on the device I tell it to open in Pages, it goes through an import for me to edit the file. I'm not sure if I export it back out if it will go to the same location. Clearly the ability to do real work on an iPad is still in its infancy.

You also had a list of things to do at home. If you use screen sharing like RemoteTap (iphone app running 2x), you can do everything on your iPad that you can do on your Mac because you are controlling your Mac from your iPad.

I didn't do this today. I wanted to file my taxes. I walked down to my office and sat in front of my Mac and ran TurboTax. But I could have run it remotely using remotetap from my iPad. At least I had the option.

 

[kmarketing]

HI,

Thanks for the responses!

So it does sound like for now at least, I would still need to have both portables with me (ipad and netbook) for some of my uses. Is that right?

 

[Bodhi395]

one thing to remember: iphone os is not extremely stable, and the iPad is very new, so if it crashes on your trip, you could lose all your pics and video.

What are you talking about, the iphone os IS extremely stable!

I've never had my iphone totally crash, and at the worst you could merely restart it.

The fact its so locked down makes it stable as opposed to more open OS's.