For those of you who have had our iPad for more than a month, what’s your current opinion of it?
Are you using it regularly? Once a day? One in a while? Is it a doorstop?
I’m trying to understand if the iPad is going to be revolutionary like some say, or whether it’s just another gadget that will find a reasonable market until something else comes along.
I’ve had an iPad for about six weeks now, and I might as well go ahead and have it surgically implanted. It goes almost everywhere with me. I read it in bed, I use it while watching TV, I keep it with me at work to look stuff up, take notes and do quick technical drawings. In the evening, I play games on it, read magazines, etc.
If everyone is like me, this things is going to revolutionize the way we use computers and the internet. But maybe I’m an outlier. I’m an information junkie.
So… how useful is your iPad? Still glad you bought it? If you use it heavily, which apps are you using?
My experience is just like yours. I’m seriously considering rationing my use as I’m only halfway joking when I say I’ve become entirely dependent on it. If I didn’t have to get up and go to work, I’d never put it down.
Even playing guitar, which had long been my major technology-free activity, involves the iPad now. It holds my sheet music, my tuner, my metronome, my backing tracks, and all my instructional books and videos.
It’s possibly my best bang-for-the-buck purchase ever.
Sam - are you also a smart phone user? Why do you use the ipad instead of the smart phone? I uuse my smart phone for about everything you except as a book reader, so I don’t see the attraction
Well, I’ve only just bought mine but in answer to China Guy’s question, part of the attraction is being able to see what I’m doing. Even with my glasses I can barely read anything on my phone and even when I zoom in I don’t have the patience to try and navigate the page. As for where I’ll be with it a month from now, I guess that depends what cool apps I find.
Personally, I’ve had every iteration of the iPhone (except the latest one), and prior to that two different Palm Treos, and a Palm TX.
Since buying my iPad, I hardly directly use my current iPhone anymore. The iPad does everything my iPhone does, app-wise, is far easier to type accurately on, is faster, and more responsive. It has also replaced my Kindle 2 for reading. Plus, even without iOS 4’s backgrounding, switching apps on the iPad is almost as fast as double-tapping home, finding the app in the dock, and selecting the running version on my 3GS. Really, the only use I find for my phone now is while traveling and needing to look something up (due to the 3G data connection) and for listening to Pandora while on the road.
In a nutshell, outside of a select few limited things, everything my iPhone can do, my iPad can do equally as well or better. Calendars are easier to view/update. Emails easier to read and send (IMO). E-books easier to read (though I’ll grant the Kindle crowd the advantage in bright sun). Websites like the dope are a LOT easier to read and scroll through. The only advantages my iPhone has is the 3G antenna, it’s small pocket-size, and presently iOS4’s backgrounding (which is coming for the iPad in the fall anyways).
Oh, and I’ve had my iPad since the end of the first month it came out.
Define “not take off.” They’ve already sold millions of them, and can’t keep them in stock many places. If they never sold another one, this would be a successful product.
I use my iPad all the time, largely as a media player (Netflix, Air Video to stream from my media machine, Podcasts & iTunes U, sometimes the ABC player), e-reader (Kindle, mostly), and game machine. At work, I use it for e-mail, calendaring, and very short notes.
The only thing that keeps it from replacing my laptop altogether is the lack of decent input: even with a physical keyboard the software limitations make it clumsy for entering long documents (which I create a lot of). With just the on-screen keyboard, it’s worse. But the laptop gets about a fifth of the use it used to.
That said, there doesn’t seem to be a single decent RPG for it yet: a bunch of so-so Diablo clones with clumsy input, and some “strategy RPGs”, but nothing really 3D and immersive except “The Quest” which has never been updated from the iPhone form factor (and also has pretty clumsy input).
Our ‘family’ iPad is now pretty much the property of my wife
She uses it constantly and has nearly stopped using the main Win7 box in our home. The iPad is used for reading books as the last thing of the day, E-mail, News and Facebook updates in the morning. Web shopping and games in the evening. She is amazing fast at typing on the onscreen keyboard.
There is a small group of people on this list that don’t like the iPad and hope for failure. I frankly don’t get it. They wouldn’t give two shits if Asus or Gateway died, but throw an Apple on the front and they just can’t figger out the value proposition.
I say this with an Alienware Hackintosh that’s 1/4 the cost of an identically equipped Mac Pro.
I’m tempted to say ‘don’t feed the trolls’, but it won’t matter either way.
I use it constantly. 3 hrs a day while commuting. I carry it to meetings as it’s lighter than my laptop and I store several documents on it that I regularly access in meetings and also can keep on top of email with Outlook Web Access. It’s replaced my laptop as my read and surf in bed device as well.
I charge it overnight every night and I have a charger at work as well for heavy usage days.
My husband, the gadget geek who sold me on the purchase uses his a little less but not much.
Wow, it sounds like most people are having the same reaction I did.
So I’ll go out on a limb and say this is revolutionary device. It may be priced a little too high for mass market acceptance, but that won’t last long. Maybe another company than apple will make an even better device. But it seems like the form factor and general usability of this machine has found a sweet spot that causes people to really engage with it on a regular basis.
If people are that fired up about it, word of mouth has to be great. For myself, I’ve almost become an iPad evangelist. When people see me using it and ask if it’s worth it, they get a resounding yes from me. One of my co-workers bought one on my recommendation, and loves it. Any device that inspires that kind of passion in its users is going to find a big market.
I got mine a week ago (thanks to my tax refund) and I was really busy at work so I haven’t gotten to use it as much as I’d like. I’ve downloaded a few books on it, and I have several newspapers and magazines as well. I have also become completely and hopelessly addicted to “Angry Birds”. I will probably use it mostly as a reader. The advantage of my iPad over my Droid is that I can see everything. After using my iPad for a few hours, my Droid felt really tiny!
I’ll definitely accept that for some people it is useful, but how is it revolutionary? It sounds like a fun device that makes some incremental quality of life improvements, but it doesn’t sound like the IT revolution, here.
It is not very surprising to me that the iPad has been such a success.
The industry has been heralding the tablet PC (which is what this gizmo actually is) for more than a decade.
It took Apple to make it gee-whizzy and functional enough to get the idea past its inflection point.
Now that the market has been established we can expect other companies to create good, bad and indifferent versions of their own which will drive the prices down.
I look forward to what happens in late 2011 and early 2012 when the soopersekret development projects from Dell and HP come to market.
I can imagine a form factor similar to an iPad running Win7 and all the associated software we have come to expect from a PC.
Since getting my iPhone last September, I hardly use my laptop (basically only use it to watch media). I can see an iPad making both my iPhone and my laptop obsolete.
Does anyone here use Google docs much on their iPad? If Google docs retains the functionality from my laptop to an iPad, then I think I’d be all set.
It seems that way, but then again so did the original computers, the Internet and laptops until their full effects were understood.
Im only being partially sarcastic when i say, i can imagine flying cars – doesn’t mean they’re going to happen.
The iPads biggest draw is that it takes what net books started and completes it. It’s not meant as a primary computer, it’s meant as a quick, on the go web/email/reader/gamer/etc.
You can choose form, computing power or battery life. Pick two. The iPad chooses form and battery life, desktops choose computing power and battery life (keeping you constantly hooked into a wall), and laptops choose some combination depending on how high end they are.
You can’t put a 300 gig HDD into a tablet yet, or a 2+ ghz processor, or 2+ gigs of ram… Because then you’ll need a giant battery, fans, etc to deal with those pieces of hardware. And at that point, it’s so big you might as well throw a keyboard on the fucker, and end up with an hp touchsmart tx2 (which i also own).
My iPad is great, I use it all the time. It makes Reading on the go way easier, and has ended up almost being a break even proposition, and long term I’ll save money on books… But that’s more a justification than a consideration for purchase.
If there’s going to be a non-Apple success story, I don’t think It’ll be from a windows 7 based device. I can see Android making inroads, but Windows 7 has too hard a time getting away from a Windows, Mouse, Pointer interface. Apple’s success was in taking the UI and throwing the old one away, They did it with the iPhone, they did it again with the iPad. The reason it’s successding where others haven’t is because they actually looked at how the device was used first, rather than saying 'we have this thing, how can we cram it into a tablet.
Things like the JooJoo have been developed that way, but they’re a MUCH smaller shop, and it’s downright impossible for a small company like that to fire on ALL the things needed for a succesful product. You have hardware, firmware, OS, GUI, and interoperability…Apple’s delivered on all of those, if a company misses on one, they’ll not be successful.
I say this while watching the iPhone 4 debacle with great interest. I think Apple’s too big and too full of themselves and may be turning a corner simply because they can’t get away with ignoring the PR like they could when they were a smaller, more hungry company.
Many people made mp3 players before Apple, many people made phones before Apple, many people made tablets before Apple…what’s the secret sauce that lets Apple pounce on, then devour a market where others have failed?
