iPad Rant

I have been messing around with my iPad for the past one week or so now and I feel like I should share some thoughts about it. Quite simply, it’s great. It’s a whole new way of doing some computing elements. Notice there I mentioned ‘some’ rather than saying it IS ‘a whole new way of computing’. It has some severe limitations when compared to ‘traditional’ computing. Especially when compared to a PC.

Let’s start with what it’s great for. It’s absolutely brilliant for internet browsing. No nonsense. Some of the apps just makes the internet look so different when compared to PCs. Social networks, youtube, facebook etc are just so effortless and a whole lot prettier. It’s also very portable. A lot more portable than my current Dell laptop. However, I have yet to experience it’s mobile internet capabilities. The reason is as follows – yesterday I went to the big Celcom service centre in town (big for Sibu) hoping that I can somehow convert my current mobile broadband subscription to be compatible with my iPad. I already have a TMNet landline with WiFi in my home (which sucks – it’s a lot less stable than the mobile broadband, slower, and customer service is the legendary rude-slow-inefficient sorry excuse of customer service that TM is famous for. The only thing it’s got going for it is the fact that there is no download limit. Hell, if celcom would introduce a service with no download limit, I’ll switch over in a heart beat).

The ladies there said they could extract the SIM card inside my dongle to make it compatible with the iPad’s requirement for a micro SIM card. What I didn’t realise was that ‘extracting’ meant to put the poor sod under a stapler like device and physically breaking it into a smaller component. I watched in horror as they broke my Chinese dongle and tried to refashion it like a month old Orthopaedic Houseman fiddling and trying to refashion with a Bangla’s finger after an industrial accident.

In the end they admitted that they completely broke it and whatever was left of my dongle was no longer usable (much like the aforementioned Bangla’s digit). So they offered me a new SIM card that was then inserted into my iPad. I didn’t try it out immediately (which was perhaps a mistake) but when I got home it still had no internet connection of its own. I was about to make another trip to the big Celcom service centre (big for Sibu) when I realised that the last time they gave a replacement SIM card for my phone, it took 3-5 working days before it finally started working. So I’ll wait until next week and see what happens.

The downside of the iPad is that there are in fact quite a lot of limitation as to what you can do with just a slab of glass as an input device. No right click, no proper keyboard, and form an office work and gaming perspective lags behind a proper computer quite significantly. Apple also seems to insist that I use its proprietary software (iTunes, iCloud etc) to transfer simple files like photos and documents between my PC and the iPad. Simply connecting it via the cable provided doesn’t allow me to just drag and drop my photos into the iPad. In short, Apple won’t let go of you once you bought into one of their products. Thus, I am inclined to believe that Apple - despite all that Mac vs PC bullshit and it’s bitching about Microsoft’s monopoly – is in fact just another Microsoft, albeit one with less revenue than the latter. And where is the wisdom of not having a USB port? What if a colleague passes me pendrive so that I can view her presentation (and some potentially raunchy photos – I wish)? Not having a USB slot kinda makes it a crippled laptop as far as my current working environment is concerned.

Anyway here are some apps that I have downloaded and what I think of them:

Flipboard

Amazing! The description on its download page just doesn’t do it justice. It’s more than just a program that turns everything into a magazine. It’s like a search engine that reads my mind.

Snapseed

It’s not Instagram and it definitely doesn’t even come close to Canon’s Digital Photo Professional (which I use on my PC). And certainly it’s nowhere near Photoshop as far as photo editing is concerned. However, what it (severely) lacks in power and popularity it makes up for in its brilliantly intuitive interface and user friendliness.

iBooks

It’s crap. This is the number one reason for me to get an iPad and this app is shit... in Malaysia. The number of available books to download is miniscule. There is hardly any bestsellers, no academic book worthy of the title and whatever is available is only limited to classics (and even these are only there because some nice fellows at Project Guthenberg decided that some works of literature needed saving). When I tried downloading Kindle so that I can at least find something on Amazon, I got an error message. Apparently Kindle is NOT available in Malaysia too. So Malaysia is crap... because of TM.

Office₂ HD

This is also crap. Worse still, I actually paid for it because I thought it was a really suitable program for working with office documents on the go. Serves me right for choosing the cheapest office suite for the iPad. I can hardly do anything with it as far as office documents go. This is THE reason why the computer cannot be replaced by the iPad.

Blogger (iPad/iPhone app)

I wrote this on a PC. Enough said...