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my iPad review

By Rebecca Tushnet

OT, but possibly of interest. The law school allowed me to test drive one because I use a tablet in teaching and wanted to see whether the iPad would be a good fit.

It's a beautiful machine; I like the Kindle app a ton and expect to buy even more from Amazon as a result, because I was already reading heavily on my iPhone and there's really no comparison. One should also clearly buy an iPad instead of a Kindle (though I wish the screen lock worked, the way it does on my iPhone; every time I twitch the thing rotates 90 degrees!). And I do get stopped on the Metro by people asking for my opinion on the thing.

But app siloing so that I can't edit the documents I have in Dropbox is a dealbreaker, and while the word processing is acceptable (I have yet to test the presentation software), the onscreen keyboard is only half a step up from that on the iPhone, so you'd really need the (heavy) external keyboard to type seriously. I could take it as the sole machine on a weekend I didn't expect to need to edit anything I hadn't planned in advance to edit, and spend a bunch of time watching movies on Netflix. (In extremis, you can email a document from Dropbox to yourself, then save it to edit in Pages, then email it back to yourself. A lot of effort.) But for academic use, a tablet/laptop clearly dominates.

Full post as published by 43(B)log on May 02, 2010 (boomark / email).