Unified Technology Solutions

Living with an iPad – First 48 Hours

* This is part 1 of a series of articles on my use of a Apple iPad as a replacement for my laptop and notebooks.

Well I finally broke down and bought an iPad, my business partner and several friends had bought one on release day, but I had waited to see if it was going to be more of a useful tool, or just a cool toy. During that time I gave serious thought about what I wanted to do with it considering it costs as much as a decent new laptop and money isn’t exactly growing on trees right now. After some serious thought about what tasks I do all day I came up with a list of what tasks I wanted the iPad to help me with.

Note Taking – First thought that came to mind was note taking, all day I am making notes; legal pads, sticky notes, even lunch receipts have been filled with notes in the process of my day, many are then typed or scanned into my PC at the end of the day and doing this seemed like a waste. I wanted a way to make the notes digitally so I could move them as needed.

Storage – I have bookcases full of manuals and procedures in my office that I refer to when doing certain tasks. When out in the field I often have to download a copy of the manual to look up something. If I could store them on an iPad it would mean I could pull them up much faster when needed and search through them quickly.

Email & Calendar – Anyone who knows me knows I live by my calendar, if it isn’t on my calendar it isn’t/didn’t happen. My handy Blackberry makes sure these 2 are always within reach, but the mail reader leaves some things to be desired when dealing with E-mails with photo’s. And attachments are hard to look at on the tiny screen so the iPad needed to augment the Blackberry for this.

Web Browsing – Like Email & Calendar my blackberry does web browsing, but the small screen, as found on any phone, makes it hard to read quickly and skim for the info I need so I wanted this ability too.

Remote Access – Many of our clients have grown to love the remote access tools we use, and the reason is simple. If you contact us about a problem would you rather the reply be “We can have someone out in a few hours.” or “It’s fixed.” I know what my answer is! If I could use the iPad to do remote work it would be a great benefit to our clients.

So with all this in mind I drove down to West Palm Beach to visit the Apple store, the closest place I could find with any iPads in stock. Talking to a salesman I considered my options. iPads come in 3 storage sizes (16, 32, and 64 Gigs) and come with or without a 3G (cellular) radio.

The Prices are as follows:
16GB – $499
32GB – $599
64GB – $699
For 3G version add $129 to any model. (Also includes GPS and electronic compass)

As I had no intentions to store music or movies I decided quickly that the 16GB version would work fine for me. Deciding on getting 3G was a different matter though one I had changed my mind on a few times and was decided for me by fate, they were out of the non 3G models. After paying for my iPad the Apple store did offer to set it up for me, but I choose to do it myself once I got home to see how easy the process was.

Initial setup requires a PC or Mac computer running the latest version of iTunes, and consists of plugging it in with the included cable and answering a few simple questions. If you already have an iPod or iPhone you can skip the account creation step and just decide how you want iTunes to transfer files. But creating an account only takes 5 to 10 minutes if you are new to the iWorld. (Seems like we stick “i” infront of everything else anyways) In 15 minutes I was up and running and the iPad came fully charged out of the box so no time was wasted staring at it on the charger, and we all know the worst part of any new gadget has to be the wait before you can actually play with it.

I have now had the iPad for 48 hours and I’ve loaded a few apps to play with, mainly ones I used on my iPod Touch before. I haven’t had a lot of time to try out new programs, but i already have talked to a friend on Skype, watched a movie on Netflix, and done about half of my web surfing on it with great results. But I bought this for business use so next article I’ll talk about some of the productivity apps I’ve begun playing with.