Whether in the car, on a public bus, or on a long plane trip, all of these experiences are made better with the iPad. But the problem is the iPad is naturally a delicate device. I don’t care how rugged people describe it in tech blogs, you don’t want to drop or scratch the iPad. And it’s easy to do. Protection is key especially when using the iPad on the go.

So why not dress your iPad for traveling? The Crucial Case from ChimaDesigns was made with traveling in mind. I don’t want this to sound like a promotional plug but travelers are really loving this case. It has a protective folio design, embedded pockets, a headrest strap, and kickstand, all of it’s features make it perfect for traveling.

trying to use the pad without a table is very difficult. it is too large to be held in one hand, and I’d rather use my Sony laptop if I had to type things, while listening to my music, checking emails and chatting on MSN. more importantly I can drag and drop everything I need in 2 seconds to or from my USB drives, plug a memory card into my Sony and swap things with friends.

Is anyone aware of any netbooks with a larger screen resolution?

It would be foolish to say they don’t exist, I would argue that they may be more laptop-ish than netbook-ish since the apparent definition of a netbook is a machine in an evolving brance of “sub” notebooks….

and its price on Amazon is ~ $360

I found your article interesting and made a Japanese translation to spread your experience.

http://mootoh.tumblr.com/post/602189512/two-weeks-of-travel-ten-ipad-lessons

I’m sorry but I think you don’t understand the iPad. It’s as if you are trying to hammer in a nail with a cucumber. I have to agree with some of the early comments that the way you describe your work experience with the iPad, you are giving arguments for NOT using an iPad to actually create. The iPad simply isn’t ready for that. There’s no Sync with the Cloud, iTunes is absolutely unusuable, the screen glares, you can’t type well on this thing and I have to agree with the user who said you should use a thin Laptop. I bought a Samsung NV5000 for 6000$ eight years ago and that one had a useable keyboard and a 12 Inch screen. Today, you get that for 600 bucks in a Netbook which is actually booting faster and working better than my solution back then. Today, you are trying to accomplish that with an iPad that’s simply not made for it.

Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t a criticism of the iPad. It’s criticism of you trying to convice us with arguments that are clearly against using an iPad to create that the iPad is reade for creating. I think you are failing miserably. Your article might simply come too early because when I first got my iPhone, I wasn’t able to create either – now I have QuickOffice. You should’ve taken your own hint and should’ve waited for “Tomorrow”.

My experience developing Mobile Safari has been somewhat painful. It makes, uh, interesting decisions on what to do with layout that works great on it’s desktop sibling. I don’t think it would have killed Apple to put a setting in there to disable caching, either – hooooleee shnikies is it annoying to clear the cache constantly.

The difference in our viewpoints, Underdoc, is that I don’t see my iPad as being a device solely for entertainment. I use it as a reference for my job (web designer) as well as a test platform. I have PDF books for CSS and Javascript on it. I keep sheet music on it. (Okay, that’s entertainment, but also education.) About half of the time I read email on it. I keep track of my schedule on the calendar. etc.

Very interesting and useful article!

What iPad case is on the picture? Do you recommend it?

Kevin

So your definition of ‘computer’ is ‘if I say it’s a computer’?

From my point of view as a web designer & developer, the iPad is the PERFECT computer. It supports more HTML5 standards than most other browsers (including Firefox and Chrome, and don’t get me started on IE.) It has nifty proprietary extensions to deal with gestures. It’s got a screen whose default aspect ratio is ‘portrait’ which is much more natural for my sites. And it has minimal ‘chrome’, the frame around the page.

In fact, the company I work for has had several people complain that they can’t do things on our web sites using an iPad that they can with their normal machines. Downloading PDFs to read later is a common request as is using a Flash-based document viewer and of course bigger buttons that are easier to poke with fingers. Of course, the iPad makes two of these things impossible* (and one of them a PITA for our artists) and making a seamless replacement for the Flash interface is hard because it doesn’t run a full browser – it’s stuck with a crippled** mobile browser. That’s not the joyous experience people expect from the expensive new toys and so what are perfectly good websites for 99.9% of our users generate complaints from people who think their purchase of a lesser, limited product entitles them to a better experience.

*there may be an app for downloading PDFs to read later, but 1) we don’t know of it and 2) the user experience for that scenario is actually worse than that of a normal machine

**it’s not normal WebKit no matter what anyone from Apple tells you – Opera Mobile running on Windows Mobile is closer to a normal desktop browser than Mobile Safari on iPad

Also, regarding Keynote, I’ve had terrific experiences with it so far, provided I author in Keynote either on the iPad or on the Mac. Authoring Keynote on the iPad is a terrific experience. Importing PPT is not so great, but Apple has just released an update that is supposed to improve on this flaw. We’ll see.

Completely agree that file management is a mess. Apple really needs to step up their game here. Perhaps an acquisition of Dropbox, Box.net or SugarSync?

p.s. iPad has been working just fine for about 80-90% of what I do. Most days I never need a laptop or desktop, both at home and at work. I expect this to approach 100% over the next year.

I find my iPad extremely useful at work as a physician. Some hospitals are buying them in mass quantities for vertically integrated work.

Netbooks are simply cheaply made laptops. I would prefer a full featured but netbook sized laptop from Sony than any netbook. Though they may cost $2000-3000, the Sony netbook-sized laptops have none of the limitations that netbooks have. Netbooks are just junk in comparison.

The iPad is so new, developers are still on the learning curve on what they potentially do for it. Thus, I expect more fully featured word processing apps in the future.

Certainly the open sourced code base is already there for the transformation to an iPad sized MS Word. It would only be a matter of time.

From

Ultimately, I want it to sync to my laptop and nowhere else unless I explicitly say so.

Thank you,

The Internet

Good think you’re a ‘Doc’, though I’m glad my personal physician doesn’t make such large leaps of logic. For example, I marked the first post down because of it’s name-calling without any sort of productive commentary. The second posting is equally flawed. It concludes that the iPad isn’t a computer, when it clearly is by any definition. And the poster makes a statement about requiring to ‘find an app’ to read PDFs, which is also false.

Thus, my own view of the iPad as an entertainment device rather than productivity device was confirmed. I am amazed by the number of people that have given thumbs down to the first two posts, without providing any counter-arguments. It is clear that they want to justify a whimsical purchase. People with such sense of entitlement sicken me.

Also, an ultralight laptop with decent performance and a 10 hour battery is going to cost at least 3 times as much as a base iPad.

I use a Toshiba Mini NB305 as my netbook. The screen is 100 pixels less in height. The OS is familiar and manages files as well as I need. The keyboard, camera and mouse are built in; I don’t need any accessories. I can use a range of USB devices if I choose. The battery life is comparable at 9 hours, a little less than my iPad. It cost me $150 less than my iPad. It came with a PDF reader and a variety of genuinely useful applications pre-installed. :-)

Steve Jobs’ decision to publicly diss netbooks was unfortunate, since it only begs a head-to-head comparison. A netbook is not a great casual surfing / media consumption tablet. And an iPad is most definitely not a netbook (or laptop).

I should add that I’m returning my iPad today because I couldn’t figure out what I needed to do on it that merited the $550 expense. It’s just not game changing for me. In 6 months to a year, when a variety of applications come out which really make use of the touch interface and the screen size, I can see this being really worthwhile. Today (I’m speaking as someone in mobile products for many years) I think it deserves a price point of $199 at the most.

In an ideal world, the sync would look like Things — over wifi with no intermediate cloud step, no loading/unloading through iTunes.

But then I use subversion on my plain text files, so I really am a mutant.

Isn’t that true for most computers?