Working with iPad: Consuming the Internet and Social Network (1/2)

It has been almost 2 weeks with iPad. Two weeks of trying to use iPad for my semi-daily work. Sadly, I am still too shy to bring it to work, i.e., to meetings and jot notes. I've waited two weeks to write this article, just don't want to give judgement prematurely so I set to give myself 2 weeks to adjust and learn to live/work with the new device.

I started with somewhat set of simple tasks first, like surfing the net, and blogging.These involve:

• researching. A lot of reading and searching also look up words and spelling
• lot of typing and taking notes
• switching back and forth between reading and writing
• creating artwork. Download media. Crop and resizing images
• posting blogs
• posting to Twitter, Facebook, Digg, and etc

Researching
Safari is the best. In fact, on iPad, there is no substitute for that. With Safari, I can jump around between websites up to 9 sites. There is only one thing that annoys me. That is the limited amount of memory on iPad. When I opened many pages at once, the iPad tends to run out of memory. As a result, the visiting page gets to reload every time I switch to it. With wifi access, this is ok. However, it gets more annoying when accessing the net over 3G.

Taking notes
Maybe this is just me - iRobot. I adapted the new keyboard quite quickly. I've found typing on the on-screen keyboard is ok. The last thing I want from this uber mobile device is to always have to carry an external keyboard around. For the software, Evernote is king. I like their iPhone version, and Mac os x version. The iPad version is even better than the iphone one. *Love* how Evernote put me back to where I was after switching to other apps. [picture here] Having said that, it still displays that green elephant briefly each time switching to it. iOS 4 will probably fix this.




(This blog is getting too long. In the next blog(s), we will take a look at how I coped switching back and forth between apps, and the summary view of what I've found. Please check back again.)
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