A month of iPad

I have been the owner of my iPad for about a month now and thought I would share a few thoughts on it after a months use. I bought the pad with the view that I would be travelling about a lot and so did not want to be carrying a laptop around for what would really be tweeting,checking email and a few hours reading websites or ebooks.

It has been quite an eye opener how little I have used my computer when at home. Routine tasks like checking email and reading news have now been done using the pad, if I am at home it picks up my wifi network and away somewhere the 3G connnection was been good enough to do what I wanted.

One of the things that i have really enjoyed using the pad for is reading books, I have just changed job so i am reading about a lot of new systems and to be able to get PDF copies of the support guides and easily read them has been a big bonus for using the pad. Work has access to books247.com meaning that as long as I can access the net I can read quite a selection of tech manuals and such.

Some of the games available for the pad are quite cool, I quite happily lost track of time playing plants vs zombies for most of the night. The whack a mole style level is really cool, This has also lead to a friend noting that it is to easy to spend a lot of apps with the thinking 'it's only 59p'. It all adds up.

So far my favourite Twitter app has been tweetings, this is largely due to it's filter feature which is a godsend on a Saturday night when every other tweet seems to involve xfactor.

If you are a guitar player then tab toolkit when used on iPad is a really good experience, a friend said it was good on his iPhone but with the extra screen space it is really good. Tabs can be searched for and played back all within the app and it is compatible with guitar pro tabs.

One of the things I did miss was flash video it was not a huge thing but I enjoy watching zero punctuation and safari was unable view the flash video on the site, this is an issue that has been the cause of much talk and a some marketing for android in that it does have a flash capable browser. This has changed this week with the release of the skyfire web browser, this has the functionality to transcode the flash video into h.264 which can then be viewed on the iPad. It takes awhile to come through but it does allow me to see the one or two videos that I was missing.

Apart from that I have not had any issues with the pad, until I started this post and it found that the blogger post editor does not work correctly with the iPad's safari browser, I am having to enter this post into the HTML code view, the compose text box would not allow me to enter any text.

So all together a good experience and I am very happy with my newest gadget purchase.