Hi,

My laptop has recently died and I was thinking about replacing it with an iPad 2.

I have 2 questions:

1, Can you get an external hard drive to save music, photos and video?

2, Do you need a PC to use the iPad 2 in the beginning?

Many thanks in advance.

Steve.

Originally Posted by Steve1612UK

Hi,

1, Can you get an external hard drive to save music, photos and video?

Yes but they are not cheap and only hold 32 or 64 gb or about.

Originally Posted by Steve1612UK

2, Do you need a PC to use the iPad 2 in the beginning?

Yes you have to connect it to Itunes before it will even power up

IN most cases an Ipad is not a laptop replacement.

If you don't have a PC, though, the Apple Store will set up the iPad for you. As the previous poster suggested, you can use the iPad for most things you would normally do on your laptop but probably not everything. It rather depends on what you used your laptop for. If it was for business applications then the apps on the iPad that can handle Word, Excel and PowerPoint are OK up to a point - but they struggle with 'complex' documents and miss some important features.

Tim

You can buy a Seagate GoFlex external drive at 500gig that will communicate through Bluetooth to the iPad . Can hold all your media.

And iPad does not support flash. There are workarounds/apps, but most are sluggish and unpredictable.

So ~

If you often visits sites that require flash ~ think again.

1, Can you get an external hard drive to save music, photos and video?

yes, but why not look at it in a different way?

i dont really stick to a single pc with all my itunes media (all my movies and apps and songs) because my job means i do a lot of moving about from pc to pc wherever i am.
So, i purchased a portable pocket external hard drive. a western digital 1 tb (1000gb) thing, cost me around 50 big ones. just a standard off the shelf extra drive. So I keep my permanent and current up to date media library on this, and carry it about with me permanently. Then, when ever i want to back up or sync or just copy movies/apps/songs back and forth to my ipad2 i just plug this usb drive into any computer that has itunes installed and go from here. works a treat. means im not tied down to any individual computer.

Nope, i cant plug this drive directly into the ipad, but then does it matter? no. my life and ipad life is uber uber flexible and easy.



2, Do you need a PC to use the iPad 2 in the beginning?

yes. but your local shop can do this and initialise things for you.


Ultimately, you have to look into the near (very near) future - in just a couple of very short months the new iOS5 will be released. This will mean no hard wiring from now on! itunes/media syncing, initialising and firmware updates all over the airways. awesomeness.


The ipad2 certainly replaced the need i had for my laptop, which i no longer own, but then i also heavily use desktops for both work and pleasure, which the ipad cant even come close to dreaming about replacing.
I do basic office admin on my ipad with great success in work (ie, letters, accounting, contacts, schedules/diarys, invoicing etc etc), but for me and i suspect the vast majority of users, the ipad is basically an expensive personal media viewing gadget/toy. fantastic for music, videos, gaming and browsing the web!