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I’m not actually an Apple fanboy, really.

OS X is my preferred Unix GUI, partly because the development community has a higher background level of interface design. I had a Powerbook until my housemate bricked it with a glass of coke, I had an iPod until the case fell apart, the battery fell out, the hard-drive span out and hit the concrete and I merely had a collection of expensive electronic parts.  My brain finds Apple’s user interface decisions logical.

So I bought an iPad.

There was  a host of rationalisations around this. First, I pay for a mobile broadband contract anyway because the don’t-worry-about-it is worth a lot to me. Second, with the contract it was the cheapest I was likely to find one. Third, I’ve accepted a permenant position as lead developer of Languagelab.com – upgraded from my previous contract – and can overbuy on a more solid footing. Plus, I really, *really* wanted one.

First impressions: Setup is as a giant iPod. You still have to connect it to sodding iTunes to make it do anything apart from sit there looking pretty. This is being fixed for the next major OS release, but it’s still an irritation.

I’m bored of entering my Apple ID. I’ve had to do so around fifteen times for various things (authorise iTunes for this, add Mobile Me account, add Gamecentre account, blah) which makes me wish for a centralised account system a-la android (I’m happier trusting the OS with login data than I am tin-pot organisations). Also, the decision to sync Mail, Notes & Calendar with gmail but not contacts, forcing me to screw around with pseudo-Exchange services, just seems petty.

A lot of the mindless crap I bought for my iPhone has magically appeared on the iPad, without any way of being able to tell if any of them have the ability to use the new screen resolution short of installing and booting them. (Really, Foursquare? Spotify? Guardian? Shazam? Tweetdeck? Still holding off on development until the iPad seems to be a success?) or which have decided that the iPad version should be a seperate app and you should pay for it twice (Thanks, Reeder). An awful lot Just Magically Worked (Dropbox, Evernote and WordPress’s iPad apps get special note here).

All in all it’s far more responsive than any Android-based tablets I’ve tried, and all I need to do now is carry it around for a while and work out when I bring this, and when I bring the Kindle.

Although I can already see I should possibly start looking at bluetooth keyboards…

4 comments
  1. iTunes > Device > App > Sort by Type.

    Can do the same thing in the app section of iTunes. I know this doesn’t help ON the device, but at least you can tell when removing…

    -Dx

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