No, it tries to do considerably less, but for more money.
Not true. An Apple laptop is around £500 more, as is an equally specced, equally well built pc. Of course a laptop doesn't have a gorgeous multitouch screen, huge battery life and the app store.
To me though, there is nothing glaringly missing from the iPad.............
Some glaring omissions I would suggest are being unable to use the BBC's iPlayer, no Flash compatibilty, no multitasking so no listening to music while browsing the [limited] web. Plus of course only a max of 64GB with no USB ports to transfer data. So all in all a very limited expensive gadget.
Not true. An Apple laptop is around £500 more, as is an equally specced, equally well built pc. Of course a laptop doesn't have a gorgeous multitouch screen, huge battery life and the app store.
Really? I'm pretty sure most half-decent modern laptops have good batteries and as for the app store, well that's in the iTunes store of the ITunes software!
Some glaring omissions I would suggest are being unable to use the BBC's iPlayer, no Flash compatibilty, no multitasking so no listening to music while browsing the [limited] web. Plus of course only a max of 64GB with no USB ports to transfer data.
you can play bbc iplayer via web and with jail break you can multi task with backgrounder and with openssh you can transfer files to ipad wirelessly so don't need usb ;oP and someone is working on a hack for flash
you can play bbc iplayer via web and with jail break you can multi task with backgrounder and with openssh you can transfer files to ipad wirelessly so don't need usb ;oP and someone is working on a hack for flash
Jailbreaking and hacking to get it to work "properly"!!!
Some glaring omissions I would suggest are being unable to use the BBC's iPlayer, no Flash compatibilty, no multitasking so no listening to music while browsing the [limited] web. Plus of course only a max of 64GB with no USB ports to transfer data. So all in all a very limited expensive gadget.
But it looks nice
there is multitasking with the ipod app (its one of the few things that apple allows to run in the background) so you can listen to music while using other apps and there are plenty of file transferring choices through a wireless network. the OS update in the autumn is supposed to give multltiasking... just hope its well implemented. 64 gigs is plenty unless you want to be using it for storing huge amounts of video
Really? I'm pretty sure most half-decent modern laptops have good batteries and as for the app store, well that's in the iTunes store of the ITunes software!
iPad gives over 10 hours. Most laptops will do between 3 and 5 hours, with netbooks often doing less than 2.
App Store does not equal iTunes store. The App store makes it very easy to browse all available applications, read reviews and download over the air seamlessly. It also notifies you of updates. VERY easy for the non-computer literate. On the flip-side, it allows developers to get their application out there easily and cheaply. It isn't perfect, but is a whole lot better (and more successful) than any other attempt at this in the past.
there is multitasking with the ipod app (its one of the few things that apple allows to run in the background) so you can listen to music while using other apps
the OS update in the autumn is supposed to give multltiasking... just hope its well implemented.
So if [as you say] you can multitask with this gadget why are Apple bringing out an update (so soon) to enable multitasking?
App Store does not equal iTunes store. The App store makes it very easy to browse all available applications, read reviews and download over the air seamlessly. It also notifies you of updates. VERY easy for the non-computer literate. On the flip-side, it allows developers to get their application out there easily and cheaply. It isn't perfect, but is a whole lot better (and more successful) than any other attempt at this in the past.
What are you on about? The App Store is on the iTunes store and on a PC monitor or Laptop screen it's perfectly user friendly to do everything on.
So if [as you say] you can multitask with this gadget why are Apple bringing out an update (so soon) to enable multitasking?
i said you can mutitask with the ipod app, its one of the few apps that will happily run in the background while you use other apps such as safari. so you can listen to music while browsing but only if you use the ipod app as your music player.
What are you on about? The App Store is on the iTunes store and on a PC monitor or Laptop screen it's perfectly user friendly to do everything on.
Well yes, the App Store runs on Pc/Mac (as well as directly on iPhone/iPod/iPad) but it is specifically for iPod (touch)/iPhone and iPad apps. That's the point. A very nice, easy to use eco-system.
i said you can mutitask with the ipod app, its one of the few apps that will happily run in the background while you use other apps such as safari. so you can listen to music while browsing but only if you use the ipod app as your music player.
On itouch 2nd generation this is causing funny noises during playback if the foreground application is more demanding on processor.
i said you can mutitask with the ipod app, its one of the few apps that will happily run in the background while you use other apps such as safari. so you can listen to music while browsing but only if you use the ipod app as your music player.
Quite. This is pretty basic stuff. If you don't know this, I'd go and do some research before coming on here ranting...
On itouch 2nd generation this is causing funny noises during playback if the foreground application is more demanding on processor.
i've never had a problem with background ipod playback on the 3GS... haven't used it as a music player as much on the pad but i would have thought the extra processor power would mean it would be okay, at least with most of the apps out there at present
i've never had a problem with background ipod playback on the 3GS... haven't used it as a music player as much on the pad but i would have thought the extra processor power would mean it would be okay, at least with most of the apps out there at present
It was some solitaire game where it was very obvious, the device got hot in a while and the battery was drained in half an hour Also it happened when browsing with safari and rendering some pages. The playback could do with a higher priority.
It was some solitaire game where it was very obvious, the device got hot in a while and the battery was drained in half an hour Also it happened when browsing with safari and rendering some pages. The playback could do with a higher priority.
well it does make sense for the OS to give priority to main app on the screen at the expense of the app running in the background. if resources are low and it needs to limit the processing of apps i'd rather it stutter the music than the game i'm playing
iPad gives over 10 hours. Most laptops will do between 3 and 5 hours, with netbooks often doing less than 2.
You've got netbooks and laptops mixed.
A netbook with a 3 cell battery will get 3 hours. A 6 cell battery maybe 6 hours. A colleague reckons he gets an easy 6-7 hours out of his - and that was a samsung costing sub £300.
Stick an SSD in there instead of the HD, and battery life would improve.
A netbook with a 3 cell battery will get 3 hours. A 6 cell battery maybe 6 hours. A colleague reckons he gets an easy 6-7 hours out of his - and that was a samsung costing sub £300.
Stick an SSD in there instead of the HD, and battery life would improve.
Battery life is from our experiances here, and we've thousands of them. 10 hours+ life on the iPad is while doing battery intensive stuff, like video.
Battery life is from our experiances here, and we've thousands of them. 10 hours+ life on the iPad is while doing battery intensive stuff, like video.
Video decoding is battery intensive if the device is using its CPU, but as the iPad has got dedicated hardware, that massively reduces CPU (and therefore battery) utilisation.
Obviously it varies on spec, but Netbooks are typically advertised with 5+ hours of battery life, laptops are rarely quoting those sort of figures unless you've got a secondary battery.
I've got a fairly recent Dell laptop (which runs absolutely silent, not once heard the fan go on), that'll go for just over 2 hours on a charge, and from those around me, thats fairly typical. Brother in laws brand new Asus laptop will barely go for any longer.
Some glaring omissions I would suggest are being unable to use the BBC's iPlayer, no Flash compatibilty, no multitasking so no listening to music while browsing the [limited] web. Plus of course only a max of 64GB with no USB ports to transfer data. So all in all a very limited expensive gadget.
But it looks nice
You can use iPlayer, the bigscreen interface has been converted to work great on the iPad - just not the live stream for some reason.
I've not found the web limited at all, even on my Mac I block flash. I don't use lots of sites that use flash video, but those that I do (BBC, Youtube and a few others) work just fine. I don't play Flash games, and even if I did many just wouldn't work on a touch screen device due to not having been designed for that interface so I'm happy with the dedicated games available to me on the iPad. Other than that there's add and flash only website interfaces, all things that I purposely block even on devices that allow me to see them. I've not hit on a site yet that I haven't been able to use and have been desperate to do so.
I can listen to music through the iPod, and with OS 4 (which is being release quite soon with any luck) other apps will be able to play in the background and multi-task.
Multi-tasking is being added, but in a way appropriate to the device, which is fine by me as I'm not looking to run dozens of things at the same time.
I don't need a USB port to transfer data, I just use wifi which is more than fast enough to send my data by, if I was transferring large video files I'd be doing it by iTunes anyway.
My main issue is the lack of some sort of file management, I don't want what a PC has (finder/explorer file/folder structure) because the iPad isn't a PC and really it's not the greatest of systems, but it needs something better than it has. More and more apps seem to be adding support for access to dropbox and similar services which is already proving useful to me. I think to a certain extent it's going to be a wait and see situation as more and more data is stored (or at least accessible through) the cloud. Whilst I don't want to have to stream all my music, video and other data every time I want to access it due to the bandwidth involved, I similarly don't want to have to lug it all around with me and maintain multiple copies on every device I have. I don't think anyone has come up with a 100% solution to that yet, regardless of the type of device.
On a device like this the capacity of the storage isn't an issue because I'm never going to be able to fit everything I have on one device, I have hundreds and hundreds of gigs of data and as I mentioned above I don't want to have to have that data on each and every device I have. On my iPad, as with my iPhone and iPad, I use a combination of playlists to rotate my music and it works out just fine. With dropbox I can sync whatever files I want from my iMac and it works well, not perfectly but good enough.
OS4 will address many issues and improve certain things. So as a whole, when not expecting it to replace 100% of the functionality of a "PC", and embracing the benefits it does offer I think the iPad is a very successful offering.
Obviously this is personal experience, and yes the iPad won't be suitable for some people, but I would say that it will be a better option for a lot of people than a netbook would be - especially if you already have a desktop/laptop as your "main" computer.
Comments
Not true. An Apple laptop is around £500 more, as is an equally specced, equally well built pc. Of course a laptop doesn't have a gorgeous multitouch screen, huge battery life and the app store.
Some glaring omissions I would suggest are being unable to use the BBC's iPlayer, no Flash compatibilty, no multitasking so no listening to music while browsing the [limited] web. Plus of course only a max of 64GB with no USB ports to transfer data. So all in all a very limited expensive gadget.
But it looks nice
Really? I'm pretty sure most half-decent modern laptops have good batteries and as for the app store, well that's in the iTunes store of the ITunes software!
you can play bbc iplayer via web and with jail break you can multi task with backgrounder and with openssh you can transfer files to ipad wirelessly so don't need usb ;oP and someone is working on a hack for flash
Jailbreaking and hacking to get it to work "properly"!!!
QED
there is multitasking with the ipod app (its one of the few things that apple allows to run in the background) so you can listen to music while using other apps and there are plenty of file transferring choices through a wireless network. the OS update in the autumn is supposed to give multltiasking... just hope its well implemented. 64 gigs is plenty unless you want to be using it for storing huge amounts of video
yeah, i hooked it up with the dock to TV connector and viewed it on my 42" screen plasma and it looked fine
App Store does not equal iTunes store. The App store makes it very easy to browse all available applications, read reviews and download over the air seamlessly. It also notifies you of updates. VERY easy for the non-computer literate. On the flip-side, it allows developers to get their application out there easily and cheaply. It isn't perfect, but is a whole lot better (and more successful) than any other attempt at this in the past.
So if [as you say] you can multitask with this gadget why are Apple bringing out an update (so soon) to enable multitasking?
What are you on about? The App Store is on the iTunes store and on a PC monitor or Laptop screen it's perfectly user friendly to do everything on.
i said you can mutitask with the ipod app, its one of the few apps that will happily run in the background while you use other apps such as safari. so you can listen to music while browsing but only if you use the ipod app as your music player.
On itouch 2nd generation this is causing funny noises during playback if the foreground application is more demanding on processor.
i've never had a problem with background ipod playback on the 3GS... haven't used it as a music player as much on the pad but i would have thought the extra processor power would mean it would be okay, at least with most of the apps out there at present
It was some solitaire game where it was very obvious, the device got hot in a while and the battery was drained in half an hour
well it does make sense for the OS to give priority to main app on the screen at the expense of the app running in the background. if resources are low and it needs to limit the processing of apps i'd rather it stutter the music than the game i'm playing
you should try it on your pc/laptop as your google ain't working unlike me ipad.
You've got netbooks and laptops mixed.
A netbook with a 3 cell battery will get 3 hours. A 6 cell battery maybe 6 hours. A colleague reckons he gets an easy 6-7 hours out of his - and that was a samsung costing sub £300.
Stick an SSD in there instead of the HD, and battery life would improve.
Video decoding is battery intensive if the device is using its CPU, but as the iPad has got dedicated hardware, that massively reduces CPU (and therefore battery) utilisation.
Obviously it varies on spec, but Netbooks are typically advertised with 5+ hours of battery life, laptops are rarely quoting those sort of figures unless you've got a secondary battery.
I've got a fairly recent Dell laptop (which runs absolutely silent, not once heard the fan go on), that'll go for just over 2 hours on a charge, and from those around me, thats fairly typical. Brother in laws brand new Asus laptop will barely go for any longer.
But then for the price of the Apple laptops, you can get equivalent Windows based laptops with similar battery life.
Its just a silly willy waving contest, as long as the battery last long enough for you to do what you need, then thats all that matters.
You can use iPlayer, the bigscreen interface has been converted to work great on the iPad - just not the live stream for some reason.
I've not found the web limited at all, even on my Mac I block flash. I don't use lots of sites that use flash video, but those that I do (BBC, Youtube and a few others) work just fine. I don't play Flash games, and even if I did many just wouldn't work on a touch screen device due to not having been designed for that interface so I'm happy with the dedicated games available to me on the iPad. Other than that there's add and flash only website interfaces, all things that I purposely block even on devices that allow me to see them. I've not hit on a site yet that I haven't been able to use and have been desperate to do so.
I can listen to music through the iPod, and with OS 4 (which is being release quite soon with any luck) other apps will be able to play in the background and multi-task.
Multi-tasking is being added, but in a way appropriate to the device, which is fine by me as I'm not looking to run dozens of things at the same time.
I don't need a USB port to transfer data, I just use wifi which is more than fast enough to send my data by, if I was transferring large video files I'd be doing it by iTunes anyway.
My main issue is the lack of some sort of file management, I don't want what a PC has (finder/explorer file/folder structure) because the iPad isn't a PC and really it's not the greatest of systems, but it needs something better than it has. More and more apps seem to be adding support for access to dropbox and similar services which is already proving useful to me. I think to a certain extent it's going to be a wait and see situation as more and more data is stored (or at least accessible through) the cloud. Whilst I don't want to have to stream all my music, video and other data every time I want to access it due to the bandwidth involved, I similarly don't want to have to lug it all around with me and maintain multiple copies on every device I have. I don't think anyone has come up with a 100% solution to that yet, regardless of the type of device.
On a device like this the capacity of the storage isn't an issue because I'm never going to be able to fit everything I have on one device, I have hundreds and hundreds of gigs of data and as I mentioned above I don't want to have to have that data on each and every device I have. On my iPad, as with my iPhone and iPad, I use a combination of playlists to rotate my music and it works out just fine. With dropbox I can sync whatever files I want from my iMac and it works well, not perfectly but good enough.
OS4 will address many issues and improve certain things. So as a whole, when not expecting it to replace 100% of the functionality of a "PC", and embracing the benefits it does offer I think the iPad is a very successful offering.
Obviously this is personal experience, and yes the iPad won't be suitable for some people, but I would say that it will be a better option for a lot of people than a netbook would be - especially if you already have a desktop/laptop as your "main" computer.