iPad

The iPad arrived on Friday afternoon and I’ve been sharing it with Arlene over the last day or so. Needless to say we both love it.

iBooks is a lovely product. But I’ve not used it in anger and there’s some UI in Stanza for iPhone which is, to be honest, much more friendly. What does it say that Stanza for iPhone is still a damned good eBook reader on iPad.

Twitter clients on iPad are a mixed bag so far. They range from poor to bad. Some of them have decent UIs in landscape but they totally break in portrait mode. At the moment I’m putting TwitePad through it’s paces.

Some apps are amazing however.

iSSH – so much more usable on an iPad and I loved it on iPhone. This version also includes an X11 and VNC server as well. Using ‘screen -DRRS iphone’ as the launch command creates a screen instance called ‘iphone’ and it means that even if I lose the connection due to bad coverage, I don’t lose the session and I can reconnect to it when coverage returns. I got this hint from Jared.

Articles for iPad – this is simply a Wikipedia browser but it’s also the nicest Wikipedia browser I have ever seen. It’s really simple, it looks scads better than the Wikipedia web site (which is the point, no?). And it’s Wikipedia – it’s full of mostly accurate information on loads of subjects – providing hours and hours of reading for someone like me.

The Elements – This is for science geeks and, to be honest, any other sort of geek. It rekindles all of the love I had for science, just like Pocket Universe. Here’s to more great science apps.

CastleCraft – I’ve not yet played this game because Izaak has dominated it. It’s a very pretty RTS which is apparently massively multiplayer, not that I know anything about that. But I am impressed that he got into so quickly, so easily. It’s not perfect – but it’s very very good.

Email is fun, the browser is really slick, battery life is amazing, and while we’ve really enjoyed typing on the screen (the gestures add a lot) it paired flawlessly with a foldaway Freedom Universal Keyboard that we had sitting in the office doing nothing which adds additional possibilities for the road warrior. The Freedom is a very compact addition and provides a solid typing experience.

Arlene has spent most of her time on Youtube (the web interface not the app) and it’s been seamless. The first thing she did was Twitpic one of the makeup videos playing on iPad. I think there may have been some blue boxes on some web sites but to be honest I’ve not really noticed them. Maybe on the BBC site. Which is doubly depressing as the BBC should be leading the charge for standards support.

I intend to use the iPad for work for a couple of days to see how it fares. I want something small and light and it will give me an excuse to not carry my laptop and a bag of crap as usual. I do have some concerns regarding work – server access and all that – but it’s something I can work on and I’ll have workarounds should I need them.