Jonathan Zenor Photography

Last week I purchased an iPad to bring with me on a business trip to Arizona. The primary reason for the purchase was for use in my photography. With the recent release of the iPad camera connection kit I would be able to take photos and instantly transfer them to the iPad’s nearly ten inches of pure LED beauty. This will provide instant feedback for my photos so I can see what needs to be adjusted on the camera. Couple this with the super long battery life, light weight, and small form factor, the iPad becomes the best travel companion.

Really Long Battery life

I started out my day of traveling with an almost fully charged (97%) iPad. After getting to the airport and through security I connected to the airports free wifi and downloaded the news reader app (awesome app by the way) and downloaded some RSS feeds. Then I spent some time reading a book I downloaded on the Kindle app and played some sudoku. After getting on the plane I patiently waited for the flight crew to allow the use of electronics, at which point I tried to connect to the in-flight Internet. Did you know they want $10 for that service? I think I can wait until we land to check my email for free……

After messing with that for a while, watching Top Gear and playing some iPad games (about 45 minutes of iPad use on the plane) we finally landed in Dallas. Once at the terminal I spent another 45 minutes on the iPad downloading my email and some new RSS feeds and another free game. Then back o. The plane and for the next two hours or more I read the caches news feeds, played and deleted the game I downloaded because it sucked, and watched most of the movie Taken. So altogether I had well over 5 hours of use on the iPad, probably closer to six hours. At this point I had 68% battery power left, granted I did turn the brightness of the display down a lot to save on power for most of the day (I had to turn it up again fir the movie) but still that is an amazing battery life for such a product.

After getting my rental car I looked up the address and phone numbers to the closest Apple store to see of they had a camera connection kit, which they actually had in stock! I had been looking for this thing every single day for almost a full week and everyone has been sold out of them, but finally I got close to one. So I quickly plugged in the coordinates on my gps, but by the time I got there they had sold out! What luck. Long story short, I got another apple store to hold one for me and I did finally get to purchase it, but more on that on my next blog.

Anyway, so after getting back to the hotel I did more surfing the net and checking out free apps, after which point I was down to almost 50% battery life.

So if you want to know how long the iPad lasts, I can promise you it is a long time. Screen brightness and wifi seem to make it drain the fastest but still that is a crazy amount of time.

I think I have spent enough time on that issue, now to quickly summarize what I like and dislike about the iPad.

~~~ Likes ~~~

The size, battery life, and usefulness through all of the various apps are great. And the screen is absolutely beautiful, large enough to easily surf them web and watch movies, and crisp enough to see details on photos. There is nothing to not like about the iPad’s display. Internet access is quick and easy to use and the keyboard is noticeably better than on cellphones. The user interface is very easy to use and has a natural feel to it. So much so that anybody can pick up the ipad and use it with extremely little instruction. All of this makes for a fantastic product that will be widely adopted by the public, geeks and non-geeks alike.

~~~ Dislikes ~~~

I know a lot of people complain about the lack of flash support, but I have not really found this to be a problem at all. So what if I can’t play some of the facebook games, every site I do need to access i can fully use, and the few that I can’t (such as pandora) they have apps to use.

The lack of multitasking has sucked. I can’t play pandora in the background while writing my blog post! But a fix is coming for that soon, in the mean time I will have to listen to the KLOVE app (KLOVE is a Christian radio station) which somehow manages to play in the background using Safari, or I can just listen to Pandora on my phone.

Even though the keyboarding pretty nice and fairly large in landscape mode it still is not as easy to use as a real keyboard. It is possible to type properly on this but be prepared for a lot of typos if you do. It is just too hard to know exactly what keys your fingers are hitting when there is no physicals separation of keys.

The size of the iPad is great, but it does feel a bit heavy after holding it up for a while. Some type of built in stand would have been very handy. Yet this is still really light weight compared to a laptop.

No video input. I know that it would be unreasonable to include a DVD player in such a small device, but allowing me to plug in a video source such as a DVD player would be awesome.

That’s about it. Even with these things I do not like there is just so much about the iPad to love. Overall I am extremely happy with the device and glad I purchased it, although it was a bit pricey.

What are your experiences with the iPad? Do you have any questions for me about this device or any complaints other than those already widely discussed on other blogs? I am interested non hearing your comments below.