Katy Ereira

Night with an iPad

We just got a new iPad at work. To take to meetings, perform demonstrations of mobile applications and the mobile web, and goof around on. It's currently doing the rounds - each of us gets to take home the iPad for a night, and it was my turn first. Well, excluding the boss, of course. Here's what I thought.

The first thing you'll notice when you pick up an iPad is damn, it's heavy! Most of what I did with it was for brief spans of time, but I can imagine if I were sat on the tube train, holding it in one hand, playing a game with the other... it's going to get pretty achy pretty quick.

We got a lovely orange (peach, like our company logo, get it?!) coloured magnetic cover to go with our iPad. It simply sticks itself to the edge of the iPad through magnetism, which is nice and simple... but it's not that secure! Don't be fooled and try to pick the thing up by its cover. I almost made that mistake but thank the lord it didn't have very far to fall into my arms or I may just have forfeited my life. The cover isn't just a cover, though. As you can see in the first photo, it also doubles up as a stand. Takes the weight off your hands, phew!

It also came engraved.

So, what did I actually do other than admire the thing? Well first of all I connected it to my WiFi and posted a tweet, of course! Then I went searching for apps.

The app store has a nice layout, very uncluttered... but somehow I couldn't just find a simple list of all free applications. Maybe I was being blind, but it at least suggests that the navigation wasn't as intuitive as one might hope. I managed to do a bit of searching, through both the app store and on the internet and picked up a gem - Autodesk Sketchbook Express. That's the free version, but there is also a paid version.

As a sketching app, I thought it was great. Simplistic enough so as not to overpower the casual doodler, but has all the features you would need - layers, a paintbrush editor, shapes and an undo button! So, I did a doodle that was praised in the office the next day - not bad for a finger-painting non-creative, I suppose.

I also had a little game of Angry Birds (and sucked at it, as usual), and played around with the Books app - downloaded some Jane Austen in case any of the guys fancied reading a bit of 19th century chick-lit. Love it!

I can't say I'm an Apple convert, though. The only Apple product I've ever owned was a first generation iPod Nano and only because, let's face it, Apple hold a pretty hard monopoly on portable music players. Well, at least they did at the time! The iPad is fun, but once the novelty has worn of it seems to me like it would just be an oversized smartphone, or a very expensive netbook without a keyboard. Sorry guys!