iPad

having my iPad for a week now (and accidentally leaving it at home attached to the charger) there are few thoughts I want to share about it.

As others have pointed out the iPad is really a gateway. It is whatever app you're running on it. It gets out the way and really going from it to my desktop or laptop is pretty jarring. the "Oh I have to grab this thing over here to point and click on something over there" paradigm really looks old.

I can really see getting work done on it. The key being to stop thinking that it should work like your desktop. But as it stands there are definitely some things that need addressing.

I did not get the stand. Big mistake. I will be rectifying that mistake this weekend. You simply cannot type at any length without a stand. Some people are using bluetooth keyboards with it. I'm not quite ready to go there yet. But I am a semi-touch typist, so I expect some kind of slowdown. Once I have the stand though I'm going to attempt to go the week without the laptop.

Multi-tasking. Yeah this needs to happen. Particularly for things like Twitter and IM. I wanted to download an IM program but I was not going to pay to have an IM program that can't be run in the background. No, I will not. My Nokia Internet Tablet N800 with less available RAM and a 400 MHz old school armel processor can multi-task. The A4 should as well. Yes I know OS 4.x will address that on the iPad "later" but really, this needs to ship sooner rather than later.

File access: It is clear that the original idea for this thing is to consume media not create or share it. That view is Myopic. I have already created documents on this thing that I needed to send to another computer. Lack of networking reared it's head in the most unholy way. Of course if I had multi-tasking I could have done what I wanted on the 'Pad without involving my laptop but well, that's point number two.

Worse though is that I cannot access my NAS. Well I could if I install an app that would access it via SMB. But then, as far as I've read I would have no means of saving it back to the NAS. That's just nasty. This lack of AFP access to volumes is a huge deal. the iPad is certainly capable of more than what it has by default. It is certainly more capable of being a media consumption device. I certainly can see doing a LOT on it that previously was done on my laptop.

Bluetooth: What is with this bluetooth module? I tried to connect my Nokia to it to act as an input device and it failed because it didn't recognize it as a keyboard. It simply ignored my bluetooth GPS module. Why? I can't tether it to my cell phone to get internet access. Why? Oh that's that ATT thing right? I don't want to go the Jailbreak route but it's pretty inexcusable to not be able to pair with a bluetooth GPS on something that has maps. It's not cool to not be able to tether either. I MIGHT get one of those MIFI devices but I shouldn't have to.

That's it for now.