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My one month review of the iPad

Matth3w

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My one month review of the iPad...

PROS:

* Amazing battery life. I can easily use it for 10 hours even while watching movies and playing games. Nothing at all compares to this. Honestly when It first came out, I thought "boy it's lacking an awful lot" but in reality i think that it helps with battery life. You start adding all these ports and whatnot and that drains the battery.
* Completely smooth. No choppiness or anything when opening programs, very nice.
* Great display. Even on auto brightness the battery still lasts forever.
* Jailbroken i can multitask using backgrounder and play snes4iphone using my WiiMote, among other things
* Flash is pretty much a non issue for me. Every website that i cared if they had flash support has converted to HTML5 for the iPad
* I also thought 64gb would be too little for storage but neither my wife nor i's iPad is filled and we have movies, music, apps, books, etc
* The iBooks app is better than my Sony ereader. I have had no issues with my eyes hurting, and the app is faster than the ereader was.
* I use my motorola droid to connect to the internet via wifi so no need for the 3G model, the extra 30 bucks a month, or having to deal with ATT crap 3G coverage (ATT has no 3G within an hour and a half of me)
* Other than some minor issues that i go into below, the keyboard is great and easy to type on
* Plenty of awesome apps and uses for the device that you wouldn't think of until you owned one
* It's lightweight and has eliminated a ton of cords...making traveling easy as hell with a ton more room in my carry on. I've eliminated chargers and pc cables for movie players, laptops, ereaders, you name it.
* No need for a network card...I just bought an airport express, set it up once at home, and now i can go to a hotel and just plug the Internet cable if it's wired to the APE and im good to go
* Wife and i can play some pretty fun games like scrabble and ten pin shuffle wirelessly
* Native support for Arabic font (I frequent www.bbc.com/persian)


CONS:

* I often get pretty bad typing lag especially on forums. This is the one area that the graphics engine does not do well...it can process HD video and games, but not 1kb smiley faces. This isn't an issue specific to the iPad as my over clocked droid has the same issue
* I hate the app store. I like the layout, sorting, and searching much better than the android market...however, you cant get refunds on apps like you can for the first 24 hours on the android market. This sucks because if a developer releases and app that turns out to be super buggy, you have no recourse. For example, today I downloaded iBearMoney, a finance app, for ten bucks and it does nothing but crash despite good reviews. So im basically hosed out of ten bucks, which adds up
* The keyboard randomly doesn't auto cap the letter I when in the middle of a sentence. I have no idea why that is. Very minor annoyance, no big deal. You can see in this post where some of my Is are capped and some are not.
* The app store still isn't great for iPad only apps. It's missing a ton of apps that you would expect to be out...facebook, bank of america, usaa, etc. That being said this is just a temporary annoyance as i am sure the apps will begin to pour in.
* You have to convert all of your movies to play in iTunes. Even with a dual core 4.26GHz, 4GB RAM, etc etc...a full movie takes about 30+ minutes to convert using handbrake. So now I have all of my DVDs and TV shows on the original DVD, on avi format on an external drive (in case the DVDs get lost, scratched, etc) and now i had to buy another external drive to hold all of the DVDs in m4v (iPad) format. It took about seven straight days to convert all of my movies alone, not counting tv shows.

EDIT: Some updates that I forgot when I copied and pasted my review from the Corvette Forum where I originally posted it.

- Some of the apps that look like crap in 2x like Facebook can be forced into full view as a legit iPad app using Full Force (must be jailbroken). Some cannot, they crash or look like crap.
- I got rid of Handbrake and now use Nero Recode which works better (some movies would not convert in Handbrake but do in Recode), quicker, etc. Still have to convert which sucks, but at least the program is better.
 
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All and all good stuff :)

And as you stated, there will be plenty more apps made just for the iPad. Sometimes we forget this thing has only been out two months.....
 
Yeah it was just a note. They claim there are a bazillion apps for the iPad but let's be honest - the iPhone apps look like junk even though they work, UNLESS you can force them with Full Force, and even then you have to be Jailbroken.
 
Yes, I should add the additional things since I posted this that I like and dislike.
 
My one month review of the iPad...

* You have to convert all of your movies to play in iTunes. Even with a dual core 4.26GHz, 4GB RAM, etc etc...a full movie takes about 30+ minutes to convert using handbrake. So now I have all of my DVDs and TV shows on the original DVD, on avi format on an external drive (in case the DVDs get lost, scratched, etc) and now i had to buy another external drive to hold all of the DVDs in m4v (iPad) format. It took about seven straight days to convert all of my movies alone, not counting tv shows.


Air Video Streams Any Video to Your iPad, Is the Best $3 I've Spent in the App Store

Air Video will convert and stream any video on the fly, directly from your computer to your device, no matter where you are.

It played every video I threw at it including .FLV (Flash) and .MKV (Blue Ray) videos over-the-air to my iPad.

Any file you have on your PC or Mac, as far as I can tell, it converts real-time (quickly) and plays it over your Wi-Fi connection to your iPhone/iPad.
 
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1. Your home computer has to be turned on.

2. You have to have an internet connection.

3. You have to have an internet connection that is fast enough to stream.

No thanks.
 
It's interesting that you mentioned about the slowness of forums etc. I hope forum development is going to change to give better experiences for people using "mobile" devices.
 
Android has an app called Tapatalk, and some devices have mobile settings but usually they lack the features I am interested in....like being able to access the user cp, or they just render the pages and links really stupid like.

I will try to update this when I get home or sometime this weekend. I keep meaning to but then I forget.
 
I'm not sure this forum is tapatalk enabled, I have never used it to be honest. It's a little limiting.
 
I haven't tried it myself...purely because I don't want to use anything other than a browser to browse the freaggin' web, not another App. That's just putting a band-aid on the problem....what needs to happen is better development of the forum software itself (vBulletin/PhPBB etc)
 

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