After resisting for a few days, I went out and got myself an iPad. I’m using it now to type this entry, to see whether it can be used for any serious purpose. Here are a few thoughts:

The keyboard takes some getting used to, but I can type surprisingly fast on it. The iPad does a good job of predicting and correcting my mistakes. There are a few keys thoughts are at inconvenient places, such as the apostrophe. It’s not hard to type a relatively long piece of writing on this thing. Having said that, I wouldn’t suggest typing your dissertation or even a short paper on it. It does allow for a bluetooth keyboard so that would help. You’d have to make do with Pages, which I’ve tried to use in my computer before, to varying degrees of success. iWork Pages itself is great at certain things, but not others.

I kinda have the wireless disappearing on me a few times, although I still have a connection. Not sure what is up with that, but it suggests that the signal isn’t really gone.

YouTube wasn’t as smooth as I thought. The videos were a bit choppy and I expected it to be smoother. Netflix was great, though. I mean, stunningly so. The videos might have been buffered better or something, ‘cause the quality was good. I’m not a fan of this red for ubiquitous entertainment so maybe it won’t be used that often for me. Update: Just tried playing some YouTube videos again and they stream fine. My router speed drops to painfully slow levels sometimes so maybe it’s not the iPad.

Doing HTML on this is not fun. It’s a bit tricky to get the cursor to the right location without it trying to copy and paste or highlight something. Could be there’s something I’m not doing right. The handwriting Chinese input is impressive but it’s only for Simplified Chinese. I kinda realize that it’s not the easiest to handwrite traditional characters on the pad space they give, but at least the pinyin could have afforded traditional Chinese. Probably something they’ll add later.

Maps was great but I give Google props for their hard work. I was stunned to see that they actually have photos of my grandmother’s street in Taiwan. It would be great to see more of this done around the world.

I never owned an iPhone so this whole syncing back and forth thing does take some getting used to.

I haven’t come across too many pages that look off on the iPad. I’m sure there are plenty out there, but I’m guessing more and more sites will try to make their sites viewable without Flash.

Reading on the iPad is pretty interesting. I’ve yet to read a full length book but I’ll have to give that a shot. I got some free stuff from iBooks through Project Gutenberg and also bought a book through their Kindle app (The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson). It’s nice that there are programs like Calibre that converts PDFs to ePub format. They might look a bit off on iBooks but it’s tolerable.

I’m really interested to see whether I can replace my laptop with this at conferences and other presentations. If so, this would be a great device to have.

Need to make sure pug hair doesn’t get into the device.