What Can an IPad Do

[old blue]

I'm considering an IPad primarily for use when travelling. I spend a lot of time on airplanes. For those of you that have IPads maybe you can answer a few questions on how this works, what apps I may need to do this, etc.

1. EBooks - I know I can buy and read books. What about putting notes in the books? For example I travel with a guitar and am always lugging around instructional books and tab books. I like to make notes in the books, insert chord diagrams, etc. Can this be done easily with ebooks on an IPad?

2. Magazines - I subscribe to several magazines that are now offering "digital delivery". Can these be downloaded for leasurely reading at 30,000 ft? How easy is it to clip and save articles from emagazines for later archieving in an easy to find storage/retrieval folder structure on my PC? My house is always cluttered with old magazines waiting for me to cut articles for saving, and I never seem to find them again.

3. Movies - I have a rather significant library of DVDs at home. How easy is it to copy the DVDs to my PC for downloading to the IPad for viewing on the plane?

Thanks.

 

[Purpleorchid]

I can answer #3. It is very easy to convert your DVDs to watch on the iPad. Handbrake is what most people use. I use software from SlySoft. Each movie ranges from 500Mb to 1+Gb in size.

 

[USBill]

Both iBooks and Kindle books can be highlighted,bookmarked,and annotated.

PDF files (at least the ones I have in Ibooks) do not take annotations.

Magazines would depend on the magazine since many publishers seem to be creating their own readers. I suggest you visit the Zinio website and do some title specific research on that topic.

Movies are tedious to copy but not too complicated. I tend to purchase content that I haven't seen yet from iTunes. But I do have a couple of titles that came with digital downloads (special edition of Wall-E for example) that I loaded on my iPad because I have an excess of space. I think of them as power failure entertainment.

 

[wrecklass]

Magazines are a problem while Apple figures out how to let them in and get part of the money for each issue. Zinio allows you to get many digital magazines, but it is a very basic app and you are basically getting scanned copies of print publications.

PressReader does about the same thing for newspapers.

 

[SweetPoison]

I can answer #3. It is very easy to convert your DVDs to watch on the iPad. Handbrake is what most people use. I use software from SlySoft. Each movie ranges from 500Mb to 1+Gb in size.

Marking my spot on this! My three week vaca is approaching in one day. I am going to do this!

 

[lumberjak]

Use Oplayer for your movies, no need to convert (assuming you have them avi's). otherwise Handbrake for conversion.

iBooks/Kindle/Stanza for ebooks. I started with iBooks and love the bookshelf look but slowly transitioned to Stanza. About 70% of my usage is book related and the iPad is amazing for this (would have bought an ereader but the iPad as an all-in-one device beats 'em all)

iBooks are also good for any magazine in PDF form but i hear great things about Zinio and figure it's probably the better direction.

 

[King Hal]

Zinio actually has a number of mags specifically for iPad