Saturday, July 24, 2010

Nice one Apple ... not!

Now, let me start this by saying that I've been an Apple fan for a long time - in fact I worked with and for Apple over a number of years from 1987 to 2000. Apple do make some seriously cool products. While the school I work at is predominantly a Windows laptop environment I have an iMac at home and an iPod touch, and more recently have had this great little iPad to work on. 

I bought the iPad outside of the Apple channel in NZ as the device only went on the market in NZ today. 

And this is the source of my beef with Apple. You see, I registered with Apple for notifications about the iPad as soon as you could on the NZ store site. I did the same on the Apple Australia store. Two weeks before the iPad went on sale in Australia I got an email from them telling me I could order on line - except being in NZ they wouldn't ship. But at least I got an email!

But any info from the NZ website? Nope. Even after the news broke a few days ago that the iPad was to go on sale from today, nothing. In fact the Apple NZ store doesn't even have them listed as of today! Go figure that.

So - why the hell did they bother with the registration for notifications of the iPad? Just to annoy me? They probably succeeded. What do they intend to do with the database of emails they collected?

I guess I won't hold out any more hope to get an iPhone notification - they are due here end of next week, but I don't expect Apple will let anyone know.

Strange behavior for a company that is supposed to sell things.

 


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

A Week with an iPad

I picked up a 3G iPad ahead of their release here in NZ exactly a week ago. Resisting the temptation to post an initial impressions type entry, I've held off until now. So, what are my impressions one week into the exercise?

Positives:
1. the size - I've had an iPod Touch for a while, and one of the things I've not liked about it was it's small screen to use with the on screen keyboard. The iPad has a look and feel about it that suits my big fingers. The size is great.
2. The battery life - quite simply I can get a day's useful life from a charge. That beats the best laptop I have used by several hours.
3. Instant on - no wait for extended bootup times on a PC. Just turn it on and you are in action. Certainly makes it easy to do that last minute forgotten task - like booking the movie tickets I forgot to do last night. Took no time to do compared with having to reboot my PC - which inevitably takes 5 minutes to be usable.
4. Applications launch instantly. Get working quickly.
5. Screen - awesome clarity.
6. Weight - you hardly notice it. I've longed for a device that was both light enough and had enough battery life to allow me to read RSS feeds and the like from the comfort of the couch - this is it - light as a book - I've read more this last week than I would have with my laptop a much more.
7. Availability of applications to do work.
The App store makes it pretty easy to spend money! I splashed out on the iWork suite (Keynote, Pages and Numbers)for around $40NZ






and last night decided I couldn't be without editing access to my Google Docs accounts so paid another $19 for Docs to Go.






Other than that - all the apps I have so far are free and while I haven't spend that much time looking - there are literally tens of thousands available. The low cost nature of so many of them is both a good and bad thing in my view - low enough to entice me to pay for them without plenty of research.
8. Diigo has an iPad app - just found this yesterday and have enjoyed using it. It seems to work just fine with all the usual Diigo features.
9. Blogpress - decided that I just couldn't use the web version to edit my Blogger account so splashed out the $4 for BlogPress - already worth the spend by being able to insert graphics. Still need to sort out video and some other formatting basics though.

Negatives:
1. No multitasking - having to head to the home pages each time to launch a new app is slight drag - if therr is a mitigating circumstance it is that the instant switch from one app to the next is bearable.
2. No folder structure for organizing apps - so I have several home screens that are kind of in an order that I like, but I'd much rather have a few folders on one screen with my apps organized - I know that both of these issues will be fixed with iOS 4 (which I have installed on my iPod) - but I want these now!
3. No Flash. Yes, like most others I've read the press about Apple and Adobe and their very public falling out - but I'd be a lot happier if all the web sites I wanted to use were fully functional. No Flash is a pain.

There are still a number of things I need to get used to. I'm typing this on the iPad - and am about to go back and try to put in the links for this post - this is where multitasking would be handy and I don't have it! BlogPress makes is a bit easier.

My aim is to make this my main tool for most of my work ... So far I'm pretty happy with the functionality, but there are still a few things I need to resolve before I can go completely over to my iPad.

I have now completed my first KeyNote presentation and am more than happy with how that application comes together. But my biggest issues seem to be that I have yet to completely master editing my blog posts and that moving files around is not as "intuitive" as I might like.

Location:Christian Rd,Waitakere,New Zealand