It works just dandy with latex surgical gloves.
I just tried it a few seconds ago.
Yeah, vinyl ones work, too (just tried it). And you can use it through thin screen protectors, assuming it’s like the iPhone, although the vinyl gloves make drags and things a little odd because they’re “sticky” on glass.
But that’s because all those materials are thin enough to allow the capacitive charge; insulating gloves (insulating in the heat or electrical sense) wouldn’t work (and again if it’s like my iPhone, very cold bare fingers don’t work, either). I foresee disappointing sales figures among igloo residents.
I’ve also tried one of those iPhone styluses – it works well for tapping and the like, but it’s some sort of soft rubber/vinyl on the end, and dragging takes some getting used to – it tends to “skip” a bit. This didn’t matter on the small iPhone screen, but the iPad often calls for longer drags, so I’m hoping they come up with a “hard” pointed capacitive stylus (anyone know of one?). I mostly use the stylus when I want to keep fingerprints down; it doesn’t really offer any other advantage over a finger except maybe a little more precision, which the iPad is designed not to need in most cases.
I don’t know if a pointed stylus will be possible. Try using the edge of your stylus, it doesn’t register. It must need a certain amount of contact are to work.
Hopefully people will come along to develop a better stylus. Unlike with the iPhone, I think the demand will be there to justify some product development. I do think Steve Jobs is wrong to discount the stylus. I don’t know if there will be apps to make the stylus unnecessary, but I haven’t seen it. I would want to use the iPad to take notes exactly like I would on a piece of paper.
Interesting. I don’t have my iTouch with me but I just tried my iPod Nano (which also has a capactive control) with latex gloves, and it only worked intermittently. Perhaps because the powder-free latex gloves we use in our lab are slightly thicker than actual surgical gloves.
There’s also a cheaper and more delicious alternative. Still, these only work by mimicking the electrical properties of the human body, and I believe they require fairly large contact areas.
Apologies for this delayed response. I doubt anyone would be thrilled if they could only replace their car’s battery with a proprietary battery that is only sold in stores owned by the company that made the car (which are not ubiquitous) or sold through online order. When your car battery goes bad, you can, and want, the ability to get it replaced anywhere at any mechanic.
To directly talk about the iPad, you actually can’t get the battery replaced at all, if your battery goes bad you surrender your iPad and they give you one that someone else had sent in. There’s no real analogue to that with cars.
Not sure it’s actually possible with the technology - although capacitive touchscreens are superior to resistive in terms of durability and response, they don’t usually have (or need) high enough resolution of sensitivity to be able to make handwriting recognition work. They’re designed for fingertips.
I’ve wondered about this too. From a quick run around the wiki, it looks like the Wacom tablets use a different technology and according to this entry, they hold patents on a lot of the technology. Perhaps another reason why SJ dislikes a stylus…
Unless, you know, you have a hybrid…with a big, expensive, proprietary, battery pack.
Disassembly has shown the iPad’s batteries (there are two) are not soldered in place. I guarantee you there will be an aftermarket replacment kit.
But that’s mostly irrelevant as battery life on these things (MacBooks, iPhones, iPods, iPads) is downright amazing. You’re supposed to get 300 full charges out of a typical iPhone battery. (If you discharge it 50%, recharge it to 100%, discharge it AGAIN to 50% and recharge it, that equals one full charge cycle). Apple considers the battery life to be acceptable if it still holds 80% charge after that 300 cycles.
YMMV, but I use about 60% charge a day, that’s 300/.6 = 500 days, but I only do that during the week…so multiply by 7/5ths …that’s 700 days. And I use the HELL out of my phone.
So after two years of heavy use, the battery will STILL last through a heavy days’ useage before needing a charge (perhaps with 10-20% remaining instead of 30%), and a replacment battery is $20. Which can be replaced in 15 minutes with a screwdriver and small plastic blade.
I fail to see the problem.
yeah you fail to see a lot shortcomings on the Ipad. First an Iphone is easier to take apart than that Ipad. How do you plan on opening it without damaging it? have you seen the disassembly videos? you basically have to break the thing to get at the innards.
I can switch batteries in my tablet in 10 seconds. screwdrivers and blades, indeed.
Wacom tablets are another technology different from resistive touchscreens - but both of them are capable of higher resolution sensing than capacitive touchscreen technologies in their current form.
I think this is because the the individual capacitor elements in the screen work less well the smaller you make them - so devices with capacitive screens tend to implement ‘finger-friendly’ interfaces - larger buttons, more forgiving tolerances on touch actions and predictive-text (or something like it) correction for on-screen keyboards where the individual buttons are small enough that the resolution of the touchscreen starts to introduce error.
I think it’s been established we’re on opposite sides of the debate. 
And you have so little faith in your skills for something that has to be done [maybe] once in a device’s life. There’s nothing here a careful person couldn’t do. (Or pay someone a reasonable fee to do)…cripes, these things are gettin 8-12 hours on a charge, how long have people been happy with changing out a couple of 2.5 hour batteries? How upset will someone be in three years when they’re ‘only’ getting 6-8 hours?
What if your iPad’s screen breaks after that? No problem if it is under warranty..except wait, that “do it yourself” battery change, that voided your warranty.
The remark about hybrid cars isn’t that valid, either. Mainly because you can still get your hybrid’s battery replaced in any of the 50 states, some states do not even have a single Apple store.
Presumably, you’d be doing this out of warranty anyway, otherwise Apple would be footing the bill.
As far as states without an Apple store, what’s that got to do with replacing your own battery…that you ordered online…and was delivered by a guy from FedEx?
Last I checked, that Prius battery pack isn’t sold that way.
My contention is: the battery is a non-issue. The vast majority will not be replaced in the device’s lifetime, if you have one whit of skill, by the time you need one, a cheap kit will be available. I’ve already done it, on an iPod that was technically harder to perform the swap on than an iPad.
I can see you’re not that interested in being reasonable.
If the iPad is supposed to be anything other than a toy, then we can imagine a scenario in which an end user might need to be sure it could be running at a given time.
I have an iPod, I don’t mind the fact that I can’t open it because it is an MP3 player. If I was on AT&T Wireless I’d consider an iPhone, and would not have any reservations. The iPad, at least from what I can divine, is supposed to be covering the functionality of something like the Lenovo ThinkPad (which I use quite a lot in my professional life), and if that is the case then woe be to a business user who needs to replace a battery before going on-site with a client. With my ThinkPad that would mean a quick trip to Best Buy on the way to the site, with an iPad no matter what method I used it would mean a minimum wait time of around one week.
I guess you can’t see the difference because your use-case for the iPad is “cool toy”, and while I’m not in the poor house by any means I don’t need a cool toy of that size, cost, and form factor.
Well Unintentionally has great faith this will be used in medical applications. Syncing with Itunes to download patient charts. Oops battery dead (since you know these will be used most likely 24/7) time to take out my scalpel and hope I don’t screw something up doing this or send it to apple for god knows how long. Only to receive another Ipad not the one I sent in with the most recent info since my last backup gone.
Just as I can see you are unwilling to consider this anything other than a ‘toy’.
Your quick trip to Best Buy will just as likely end in failure if they don’t carry the model battery you need. Based on how rapidly manufacturers change a design to cater to the whims of the masses, that’s likely.
From an enterprise standpoint, don’t look at the device as a ‘computer, wedded to an employee’, look at it as an appliance, that can be assigned to an employee as necessary.
The iPad a person is using while installing satellite dishes in a panel van can be replaced with just a sync to a new iPad. They’re largely interchangeable. That’s why, when you break one under warrantee, Apple just sends you another. Plug-in, sync, and it looks just like your old iPad. It’s an appliance.
If your business is stored in the cloud, via Google, then IT DOESN’T MATTER what device you use. You access it using a thinkpad, an iPad, an Android phone, or a loaner laptop at the company you’re visiting (that assumes you don’t just forgo the business trip all together and use www.gotomeeting.com )
I’m not telling you to BUY AN IPAD! I’m telling you that the usual arguments AGAINST buying an iPad don’t hold a whole lotta water.
I. Am Not. Buying an iPad. Any time soon.
That said, I can still see it’s a pretty nifty piece o’ kit.
It seems to me that there must be mechanical design issues with replaceable batteries that come into play. A replaceable battery needs a thicker case and a device case needs an internal ‘slot’ and a battery door - both reduce the volume that can be utilized by the actual battery. In addition, the device case becomes a bit less robust. IIRC, when the entry level MacBook went to non-replaceable, the battery capacity went up by 10%.
With something as thin as an iPad, a replaceable battery could be quite a hit to battery life. As with the iPhone, it is likely we’ll see some sort of ‘backpack battery’ or external brick battery for situations that need extended battery life.