Life with the Ipad 2 – part 1

Introduction

Okay. Let me just say that I have now joined the Apple fan club and bought myself a new Ipad 2. I get the Wifi 64GB version. I could have bought a refurbished ipad 1 to save some cash but I thought since this is going to be my first ipad, what the hell 🙂

The primary reason I get the ipad 2 is for reading all my engineering ebooks (all of which are in PDF format) and for doing annotations on these pdf document. I also do a fair amount of internet research on topics relevant to my work field and most of the time I wanted to archive these articles for future references. Currently I am doing all these on the PC and while it works, the workflow is rather cumbersome. One of the expectation of getting an ipad is to streamline this process as much as possible.

Why the Ipad and not Android Tablets?

Why the ipad and not an android device? Well, I checked out the Ipad and a whole bunch of other android devices at the local store. I must say my heart goes to the Android (the motorola xoom in particular. I find it extremely well built and well spec’d) but I decided against all of the android tablets because of one reason – their physical screen size. The ipad has a screen size more or less close to the 4:3 aspect ratio. Most of the android tablets are either 16:9 (such as the Acer Iconia and the Asus transformer) or 16:10 (in the case of the motorola xoom).

My opinion and personal preference is that a screen size of 4:3 is better for reading books/A4 documents while a screen size of 16:9/16:10 is more in tuned towards watching HD movies. I have tried to view a standard A4 document (most of the engineering articles such as those on the IEEE transactions, journals, etc are formatted to A4 or close to it) on the ipad and the experience is much more enjoyable than using the android tablets. I find that holding the android tablets in the vertical orientation will render the text too small if I wanted to view the document full page. The ipad has its weakness too but the text size is more bearable.

I also like to hold the tablet in its vertical orientation (much like holding an A4 paper) and the ipad is ideal for this. The android tablets seem to be more natural for landscape orientation. Again, these are just my personal preference.

Another consideration is that the screen aspect ratio of 4:3 is more friendly towards digital photos. My pentax k-7 produces an image of approx 4000 x 3000 pixels (14.6MP) and this is pretty close to 4:3.

Apart from the physical characteristics of the tablet, another important reason I went with the ipad is the availability of great software that are available from the appstore. So all these reasons led me to get the ipad instead of the android tablets.

Complains

Using the ipad is not all rosy. There are plenty of things I just hated the way Apple implement the iOS but I will talk about these later. One of the major gripes I have is the lack of a user filesystem. This is in my opinion one of the major pitfall of using the iOS. I don’t think Apple will improve this anytime soon so I guess I just have to live with it.

Life with the Ipad

The idea of this “Life with the ipad” series is to share the tips and tricks I have learned since getting the ipad 2.