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ISBS Review: The Apple iPad
By Brian | August 26, 2010 | Share on Facebook
When Apple’s iPad first came out, I wrote this:
As things stand today, if someone were to buy me one as a gift, I
Topics: Tech Talk | 13 Comments »
13 Responses to “ISBS Review: The Apple iPad”
Also, check out this web OS I reviewed today at Macworld; it sounds like it’ll solve some of the problems you listed here, and I’m curious to know which of the included web apps work on your iPad.
If you want something more sophisticated, try ReaddleDocs. It can open many different formats, suck attachments out of email messages, download PDFs from the web for local storage, and will connect to online storage sites like Google Docs. Best of all, the app can be mounted as a shared folder over a wi-fi connection. Drag and drop from your laptop, just like a thumb drive!
I agree that the email client sucks, but it seems you missed the mass delete/move feature. It’s cleverly disguised as an “Edit” button.
I’ve got the latest OS on my iPhone. The collapsed conversations, a la GMail, are nice, and the automatic spell check is helpful. Still not great, but better. The lack of rich text in email is unfortunate, but not surprising. It took Apple 2+ years to add cut/copy/paste and picture messages. They move at their own pace.
I recently played around with a friend’s iPad, and while I still don’t think I have much practical use for one, it is a very groovy piece of hardware. I’m especially intrigued by the possibilities of a “digital photoalbum.” I’ve got one of those digital picture frame things, but it’s not quite practical for sitting in a comfy chair and browsing — the ergonomics are wrong, the interface isn’t quite right, etc.
I also like the idea of catching up on Facebook, blogging, etc., while on the train, but I think for my purposes, a regular keyboard would be needed.
@Suzanne #2: the e-mail solution works for a while, but iPad e-mail is IMAP, not POP3, so when I open Outlook on my home PC and it downloads all of my mail (Outlook is POP3), then the mail disappears from my iPad. This makes the e-mail client an inconvenient place to store important documents. You could literally lock yourself out of your home e-mail if you didn’t want to lose a document on the iPad.
@Suzanne #2 again: Yes, there is an ‘Edit” button, but it only provides mass-delete functionality in the “Trash” mailbox. If you want to delete 100 e-mails from your Inbox, you must tap “Edit,” and then individually tap each of the 100 messages to select them. Then you can tap “Delete.” Ideally, I’d like to search for a common term in those 100 e-mails, generate the list and then tap “Edit” and “Delete All.” But after you search, the Edit button is gone! For shame, for shame…
@Jason #3: Glad you like the life stories. It’s good to know I have a career to fall back on. ;-)
Do you literally want to plug a USB thumb drive into your iPad? If so, have you investigated the camera connection kit? I’ve seen posts about mounting external sticks/drives via the camera kit, but it requires that you jailbreak the iPad.
My only issue there is once I sync the iPad with the PC, I don’t know where (or even if?) the files are on the PC. I know this sounds like me being very picky, but I like to know where the files are, physically, and is method is a little obscure. I need to Google a bit to learn more…
Out of the box, the iPad will not import non-picture files through the camera kit. It only recognizes specific picture file formats stored in a DCIM folder and imports them into the Photos app.
See here for the hack to access other types of files:
http://www.tuaw.com/2010/05/11/hacksugar-working-with-ipad-mounted-usb-drives/
Once you’ve got your external drive mounted, you use an app like GoodReader or ReaddleDocs to manage the files.
From a purely academic standpoint, jailbreaking the iPad and mucking around at the OS level looks likes fun (which is why I’ve been reading about it). Practically speaking, it’s a lot of effort and the usability of this method is poor.
I still think your best bet is an app that allows you to connect directly to the iPad over a network. I’m very happy with ReaddleDocs. I can open an Explorer folder on my laptop, copy files into the folder, and I’m done. If you were using a USB stick, you’d only be half done, having transferred the file to the stick but not yet onto the iPad. Physical connections are so 90s! Harness the power of wireless networking!
As for the syncing part, what iTunes does with some stuff is a bit of a mystery. File transfers, however, are more transparent. If you get yourself set up to pull files off a thumb drive, you’ll be copying them into a folder managed by an App. File syncing for the App through iTunes is manual, i.e. you’re using the same File Sharing facility with the Add/SaveAs buttons that you’re probably already familiar with.
No matter which method you choose, I think you can do better than QuickPDF. GoodReader has much more functionality and is only $0.99 right now. ReaddleDocs is a bit more ($4.99) but in my opinion has a friendlier looking interface than GoodReader.
To be clear, I agree that mounting a thumb drive on the iPad would be 50% of a solution, and I’ll probably check out Readdledocs. The ideal setup, though, would be what the Kindle does, which is making the iPad itself act like a thumb drive – plug it into a PC with a USB cable and just drag files from the PC directly to the iPad. The files would then be available without a network connection in their native application. Stuff like Readdledocs get closer, but the iPad just isn’t set up for that exact scenario.
The point from the review was that this wasn’t entirely clear to me until I owned one, so hopefully this discussion is informative to someone else who’s shopping around…
The “Mac way” of managing files on an iPad is through iTunes — although this is limited to the (surprisingly large) range of files that iTunes can handle. Theoretically, if you use iTunes as it’s intended, you never need to dig into your HD filesystem, because iTunes manages that for you. But right-clicking on any file in iTunes gives you a “show me where this is” on the Mac, so I assume it’s the same on your side of the Great Divide.
Alternately, we have a great excuse to get together sometime with your laptop, your iPad, and a couple of beers and figure out how to solve these problems….
As for iTunes, I like your terminology – it’s the “Mac way.” It “just works,” although the details are sometimes a little fuzzy. There is a right-click “show in Windows Explorer” option, but your statement about iTunes’ “surprisingly large” range isn’t accurate (at least not on the Windows side). Each media type offers one or two common choices, and there’s a few important ones missing – .pdf, .avi, .txt, .doc, .prc, .wmv, and so on. For these, you need additional software, as we’ve been discussing, and once you go that route, the amount of convenience and/or transparency you get varies pretty widely.
As I said, the alternative devices (like the Kindle) are less flexible. With them, it either works (very straight-forward) or it doesn’t work at all – period. I much prefer it the iPad way, I’m just pointing out the ideal solution.
One other thing I just thought of – with a Kindle or other such device, I could use my laptop (or even yours, I think) to transfer files. With iTunes, you’re synching with authorized machines. So it would HAVE to be my home office PC. Otherwise, I’d lose all my other content in the sync, and I’d have to authorize a new machine to sync with (putting me closer to the limit, which I think is 3 or 4). Again – the “Mac way.” As long as you don’t do anything unexpected, everything works great. Go off the beaten path, though, and obstacles arise…
Let us know how you get on Brian. I’d be interested in seeing how your review might change six months from now.
1) It’s always possible to reverse a jailbreaking by reinstalling. So you could fiddle with it and return to the upgrade path. Again, though, it’s not something I recommend unless there’s a compelling Cydia app you need.
2) Announced Wednesday: iOS for iPad not due until November. So I was wrong in my predictions, and mea culpa.
3) I’m pretty sure your iTunes will handle PDFs, as those are a possible media type for podcasts. Try subscribing to some iTunes U content: the WWDC lectures, for example, show up as a video and a PDF. I’d be very surprised if that doesn’t work for you.
4) FWIW, I’m generally opposed to closed systems like the iTunes ecosystem. The “Mac way” is closed and straightforward when you stick to the iLife apps like iTunes, but in almost every case that I’m aware of, nearly everything is possible with sufficient hacking. (Possible, of course, need not mean desirable.) My guess is that 95% of what you want your iPad to do isn’t unique, so chances are, someone will have published a workaround.
1) I’ve had a long-standing policy when it comes to computers of not doing anything that’s untested/unendorsed by the manufacturer unless it’s absolutely necessary. Over the years, it’s occasionally kept me away from the bleeding edge, but it’s also allowed me to avoid wiping hard drives, cold resets, complications during OS upgrades, loss of entire drives worth of data, etc.. As such, I won’t be jail-breaking my iPad, even if there’s a way back. The long-term cost/benefit just isn’t there…
2) I don’t know, November’s pretty “right around the corner,” so you weren’t that far off. Either way, I’ll be sure to report back on what, exactly, changes…
3) no need to download content I don’t need. What I will try, when I get a chance, is dragging a PDF file into the Podcast section of iTunes. If it works, it’ll be interesting where they show up on the iPad. To be fair, though, .PDF was the least of my worries, because the “extra app” that handles them best is iBooks, which is not only free, but also integrates natively with iTunes (in that it creates a “Books” section in iTunes, where I can drag/drop .PDF files). So this will be more of a theoretical exercise than anything else…
4) I guess what we’re discussing here is the differenve between “it just works” and “nearly everything is possible with sufficient hacking.”. You and I have spent many megabytes discussing what would change for Apple when their marketshare got out of the single digits, and this was always one of the things I predicted: the illusion of “open standards” gives way to the reality of “everything works as long as you use our stuff 100% of the time.”
If they follow the IBM/WordPerfect/Lotus/Netscape/AOL/Microsoft pattern (which I see no reason to believe they won’t), complaints about closed systems that are bubbling now (not just iTunes, but also multi-tasking, Flash, direct USB storage, etc.) will eventually come to a boil (as multi-tasking already has), then the devices will become more flexible, then people will create more complex configurations of both hardware and software, then they will complain about more frequent system crashes, then Apple will begin taking steps to distinguish between OS problems and third-party software issues.
Their current strategy of “we’re not changing, the rest of the world should do things our way” has never lasted before. Well see if Apple turns out to be different than all the rest…
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