iPad - My Review

It's been a while since my last post, and I've been meaning to write this review for some time now, but wasn't able to because I was traveling. The delay has given me even more time to play with my iPad, and I feel even better prepared.

Firstly, has anyone noticed that a lot of the "bad" iPad reviews have faded out? Perhaps the haters got tired of spitting into the wind, or they actually got to play with one and decided it wasn't awful after all. Whatever the reason, the noise seems to have subsided substantially, maybe the messages will be clearer now.


The device is awesome. Well engineered, easy to use, and categorically different from the other electronic devices most of us have chosen to use regularly. For many people this device will do to their laptops what their laptops did to their desktops, namely relegate them to much less use. Eventually this type of device will probably replace a laptop for many, but that won't happen any time soon, since a computer is required to operate the iPad.

I loaded some 10,000 photos into mine, some home videos, and 6-7 GB of music before I took a trip to visit my family. I also loaded the iBooks app as well as a few other iPad apps (some paid, some free) to keep me entertained. I purchased an iBook, my first, although I already had a couple of kindle titles which I also uploaded to the device. And after a few syncs I was ready for my journey.

Battery life was good, lasting my first couple of days of travel during which I read and listened to music for hours on the plane, and then proceeded to show my new toy to everyone that I met those days. Everyone who got to play with it was impressed. This includes my grandmother, who got to see many pictures that I had never shared with her (she does not use or have a computer) as well as my home videos, which I thankfully did not have to turn into DVD's.

I even took a picture of my 86 year-old grandma showing my 95 year-old great aunt pictures on the iPad. My great aunt has lost some of her mental faculties, but she recognized that the device was really cool. So did the three year-old son of a friend with whom I shared some zoo pics. We had to tell him the device ran out of batteries to get him to stop asking to play with it.

The bottom line is that it takes the commitment of a company like Apple to sell this type of technology to consumers. And it's more about content than the device itself. This formula helped Apple become the company it is today through devices like the iPod and iPhone. It's no surprise that it doesn't have every possible feature conceivable. It would be impossible to create such a device given technology's rapid pace of development, and it doesn't exist in a vacuum, so it must allow time for partners to "catch up."

Apple keep setting the bar higher and proving that technology adoption comes at the hands of consumers. At the very least, they have designers and engineers who seem to understand, better than most it seems, that people want technology to be both useful and user friendly. Other tech companies could learn a lot from this product and this company.