First thoughts on my iPad – how good is it?

What’s good

· The Instant On, no booting up at all. This makes it possible to use it as a diary and a jobs to do notepad, which a laptop just can’t do.
· Battery life is huge – if you use it all day you don’t even use half of the battery. So for typing and emailing and surfing and gaming on a train or air flight you’d have no worries about batteries. Again, laptops can’t compete with this.
· The typing is much better than I expected – not quite like a PC or laptop, but fine for long emails and word documents.
· Maps – The larger screen makes it much better than an iPhone, and the GPS is better than you get on a laptop, and these two come together when you use google maps when travelling. You get a nice big map, with a little dot (you) which moves along, like a sat nav, only you can see the whole screen, pinch to zoom, plan routes, see traffic jams on the map, it’s really easy. If you type curry it shows all the local ones. You can even use satellite view or google street view to check you’ve found the right place.
· Touch screen – this is so much nicer to use than a mouse. Great for the web, sifting through your emails, making mind maps, and the ipod music section.
· Overall for the traveller it’s a brilliant thing. Harder to justify the cost if you have a computer at work and one at home and your commute is 5 minutes.

What’s not good

· No flash – can be irritating, e.g. in facebook you can’t play videos, though there’s an ap for £3 that solves that, I think. And you tube and BBC iPlayer work just fine.
· Word processing isn’t brilliant. It’s fine for typing in a load of text (especially while on the sofa or in the garden, and the screen copes well with sunshine) but selecting text is fiddly and formatting is not great. Documents are best finished off at home on the PC.
· You can’t use it discreetly. Great if you’re a show-off, but if you want to quietly take some notes in a meeting forget it, everyone will say “Hey, is that an iPad! Can I play with it?