What the iPad is good for
I’ve been using the iPad home since its US release and while I was really puzzled at first about what it’s good for now I guess I have a clearer view of why an iPad really is good for.
Let’s first start with Steve’s claims:
- The web : Really average experience imho, html5-optimized websites are rare while non-suported flas is overwhelming. All i all the experience is only partial and deceptive
- Productivity : pages/numbers/keynote are not really useful, this did not enable me to replace my laptop – FAIL
- Games : Excellent experience, games on the huge screen really rox. Also the bigger surface enabled new kind of cool games such as Harbor Master
- eBooks : apart from tech eBooks I hate reading on the device, readability is average and there is just too much distraction in the device soul to enable proper immersion in the narration. I still keep my beloved Sony PRS-505 (best form factor imho) – FAIL
Thus, Steve only gets an average mark on his predictions : 1,5 out of 4.
Now a few more have become clear from my experience of the device :
- Movies : using yxplayer makes it easy to upload DivX files without the hassle of re-encoding them to the itunes-supported format (and ending up in storing them twice on you laptop, once in divx, once in mp4 in the iTunes library)
- Educational games / Drawing : The platform is amazing for kids enabling lots of fun interaction. Red Fish is a splendid example of how this can be done.
- Rich Content : The wired application shows how interactive content can become and paves the way to more interactive books (would love to see school history books revamped to take advantage of the iPad)
As a conclusion, don’t buy an iPad if you don’t have kids – you’ll probably be disappointed. But if you do it’s probably going to be an excellent investment!
