stephen greaves

Being a Mac user I love the simple design of the Unibody Macbook Pro and trusting in Apple made products I decided to go out and spend 1015.00 dollars for the Ipad 32 gig + 3G, along with the Apple Case and VGA adaptor. I was considering not getting the 3G option, however Telstra are offering very affordable prepaid plans, which is perfect to have if you do not want to be locked into a 12 or 24 month contract.

Straight way I loved the look and feel of the Ipad. Its very thin and weights about 0.73 kgs.
The screen which has a pixel ratio of 1024 x 768 makes it a wonderful piece of technology to look at. The Display is very sharp to read text from and has a very responsive multi touch screen, however the 9.7 inch LED has one noticeable draw back for me, and its that its screen ratio is 4×3. Everything now days comes in Widescreen (16×9) – like your desktop computer screens, laptops or televisions. The reason for the more square design was to allow it to fit into handbags and be more portable to carry around.

I love the idea of being able to carry around a truck load of books and information on the Ipad. It certainly will lighten the load for me and will give me easy access for showing clients video’s or photos when I come to there home or office. It saves trying to find an internet connection or sit down and open up a laptop computer while I fumble around waiting for it to load. The ipad is a simple interactive method of sharing photos with family and friends around the dinner table while enjoying a cup of coffee.

While the speakers cannot be compaired to a set of stereo home theare speakers you cannot expect much for the size of them, however I am very surprised at the base and level of volume they put out. With no usb port or many outputs available on Ipad I can say its a good thing they included the headphone jack.

It does come with Bluetooth that can connect to a number bluetooth devices such as the apple wireless keyboard, WiFi for wireless connectivity around the home or public domain, Video output via the Ipad 30 pin dock connector/ charger and the optional 3G data sim card.

It would be nice to see the next generation of Ipad come with a Webcamera for Skype or video phone calls and maybe just one small usb input would be very handy to copy over data or play a movie from. unless you have preloaded your HDD full of documents and videos before going out for the day, there is no real way of getting that data onto the ipad unless you can find it on the internet, or in an email.

The Ipad doesnt do a lot of things that a desktop or Laptop computer can do. I would say it was never meant to replace these items and it never will. What it will do is revolutionise the way we interact with emails, information from the internet and rely more and more on a computer rather than a phonebook or a schedule for the train network when out in the streets. All the information we will ever need will always be a touch of a screen away.