Fun with the iPad

[ksmith]

Apps! Office HD. iBooks. Twitterific. B&N Reader. BBC News. Games--Solitaire, Freecell, Checkers. NPR. Pandora. Epicurious. Planets. Observatory. Currently reading Salem's Lot, which came complete with eerie illos. Downloaded a bunch o' free books--Jane Austen, PG Wodehouse, Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Complete Works of Shakespeare.

Bought skins from Gelaskins. Over the long weekend, I want to try to get to the Apple Store and pick up screen protectors and maybe some other accessories. A dock. Birthday gift to myself.

I like it as an eReader/email/websurfing thing. The virtual keyboard is ok, but a little unwieldy. I have a bluetooth keyboard leftover from the late lamented iMac. Maybe that can be used. I bought Office HD as a word processing app. I will see how well it works.

It's a fun thing, like a combo netbook-ereader. Easier to tote around than a laptop.

Comments

[kateelliott.livejournal.com]

How does the email work? How is the virtual keyboard really? What email -- via Safari? (I understand it does not run Firefox). I'll be very interested to hear how Office HD (what is that??) works as a writing tool - maybe not for big ticket writing but for what one might do traveling. Or for editing, for that matter (although I use NisusWriter and rtf files as I dislike Word).

iow, I'm following your adventures with it, as I am tempted, very tempted.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

So far,the email is working well. I receive two accounts. Have not yet figured out how to separate the messages into mailboxes--mailboxes for my non-Mac account did not sync over, and I don't even know if they're supposed to or not.

The virtual keyboard is OK for short messages, but I can find no way to page within the body of the message I am typing--no PageUp/Dn key and no arrows.Touchscreen only, which means a lot of sticking the cursor in the wrong place. I may have missed the arrows, or these simply may be limitations of this keyboard. I am able to type with my thumbs, or rest the iPad on my lap and finger it. I would definitely rec a hard keyboard for anything longer than a one or two sentence message.

Safari is the browser. Mail is the mail program, and you enter in the accounts just as you would on a laptop. My MobileMe account synced over, but that's an Apple product. For SFFNet, I was on my own.

Office HD is a Word/Excel app that I hope works with MacWord. It cost $7.99, so if it doesn't work, I haven't lost much. I know many Macfolk use Pages, but I read a number of complaints about its lack of flexibility. I may try it this weekend, along with my old Bluetooth keyboard, and see how they work.