MR. HSIEH – The News Room

So I caved in a bought a 32GB wifi iPad. I was always an iPad hater, calling it an enlarged iTouch, but after playing with it at the store, I had to have it. Now, after owning this “magical and revolutionary” product (or so it says on the ads) for a couple of days, I got to know this newest apple product fairly well and here are my findings.

The iPad is smaller then most people would expect, just slightly smaller then a 8.5”x11” piece of paper. This size is perfect, with its large display. This display is what makes the iPad so fun to use. You can watch larger movies, you can play iPad specific apps, and browse the web with ease. There’s more room to do everything. The iPad is super thin and very light. It’s great for using on the couch, in the car, on the train, meetings at work, and of course, in bed.

After opening the iPad and putting all my movies and music on it, the next thing to do was download apps. There are a lot of apps out there for iPad, but the problem is that not a lot of free ones. There were only about twenty free apps that I downloaded. The rest of the apps were pretty damn expensive, ten dollars and over. Hopefully the publishers will lower their prices when there are more apps and there is more competition in the marketplace. Here are some of my favorite free and paid for apps out there now:

FREE
Virtuoso Piano Free 2 HD – Full keyboard and tons of options.
Marvel Comics – Read comics in amazingly vibrant colors. Download 6 free comics to start. ‘Nuff said.
Tweetdeck – Get all your status updates and tweets in one place. Pulls in all social feeds.
Box – Send your files to a cloud server for access later from anywhere.
Pukk HD – It’s like pong for up to two players and it has awesome tron-like graphics.
Tap Tap Radiation – a slight twist to the classic tap tap.
Adobe Ideas – A digital sketchpad.
Voice Memos – This should have been included with the iPad. Hell the iphone has the app stock. It’s okay, this one is free.

PAID
Words With Friends HD – If you like “Words with Friends” for the iPhone, then you have to buy this HD app for the iPad. It’s pretty much like Scrabble but with other iPhone and iTouch users.
Pages – If you need to take notes or want to open Word docs, you’ll need this app. All the iPads at the store were loaded with this app so I thought the iPad came with it. No such luck.

The iPad has great children’s apps too. Lots of read-along apps and soundboards to help kids learn. I think that the amount and types of apps out there can only get better with age.

There were seriously tons of things to do with the iPad and even using the thing on and off for two days, it still had 30% charge left. The battery life is amazing, way better than either of the Macbooks or iPhone that I own. Everything about the iPad was great except for one glaring thing that kept happening.

I would be surfing the app store or watching a video clip on YouTube, and all of a sudden a little window would popup notifying me that the iPad could not connect to the network. I would either hit refresh or try the action again, and then it would work. This happened only at certain wifi locations. At some places it would work great, others my internet connection was interrupted. I read through the Apple forums here, and other iPad owners were having the same issue. Apparently there was a connectivity problem to various older model routers.

Ultimately I returned the iPad because if it’s wi-fi issues. I couldn’t deal with constantly dropped wireless connection and don’t want the headache. I’m going to wait for more widespread HTML5 adoption, multi-tasking, more apps, a webcam, and a software update to the wi-fi issue. Hopefully all this will happen by the time the 2nd gen comes out, when I will be back on the iPad train.

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