Several online sites have raved about the screen on the iPad but I found it hard to notice. The fingerprint smudges on the screen were what really stood out the most to me.
So then what happened to the iPad’s “fingerprint-resistant oleophobic coating” listed in its features? Well, I’m not sure but I do know that the iPad equals fingerprint magnet. But I do wonder why they didn’t include an Apple cloth with the iPad.
The iPad I spent my time with only had three pages of apps, yet there were a nice variety of apps to experiment with. Among them were a few games including Scrabble, a few newspaper apps, the Kindle eBook Reader and the standard apps that come with the iPad such as iTunes, iPod and the App Store.
I tested the sound volume of the iPad by listening to a song from the owner’s collection in the iPod app. The iPad’s built-in speakers didn’t sound as loud as an Eee PC netbook’s built-in speakers even on full blast.
One thing I like is the full screen is dedicated to the song you are listening to currently on the iPad. It displays the album art , or on the flip side, its track information.
The iPad wasn’t designed to function as a multitasking device. However, you can listen to a song while surfing the Internet simultaneously.
Newspapers, books, magazines and the like should find themselves right at home on the iPad. The tablet format seems ideal for that type of media. Apple made the iPad’s page-flipping effortless, which is a plus.
By now, everyone has learned that the iPad does not handle Flash multimedia. Many Web sites use Flash as well as many online games. Personally, the lack of this feature is not a deal killer, but definitely a big minus for the iPad.
There are two deal killers for me in regards to the iPad and surprisingly, it’s not its price. It is its lack of a USB port and lack of an expansion slot such as an SD card reader. For safety precautions, I prefer to keep my personal stuff on a separate medium from my portable devices.
The iPad would be a nice companion to a netbook, laptop or desktop computer. Just don’t get the idea that it can be your only computing device.
Why, you ask? Because the iPad is running a phone operating system. It needs a computer running Windows or Mac OS X operating system with iTunes 9.1 or later to be set up.
By the end of my hour with the iPad, I came to the same conclusion I had when I first demoed it. It is basically an expensive, gigantic iPhone/iPod Touch! I truly think the iPad has great potential to be something more and only time will tell what it could possibly become.
E-mail me at sheila@amnews.com; fax me at (859) 236-9566; or write me snail mail at The Advocate-Messenger, P.O. Box 149, Danville, KY 40423-0149.
