iPad – it’s here to change the world!
It’s small, slick. It looks extremely good. It feels heavy enough to convince you it’s of strong build.
E-book reader. Very easy to scroll pages, just slide your finger from side to side. Nice sharp text screen, very easy to read.
Tried the map application. It had Google Maps (street map, satellite, terrain..) there, GPS pointed me where I was even though I was inside a huge metal building, about 2 meters from a window. Multitouch allows extremely cool zooming by pinching my two fingers closer or further from each other.
Screen rotation works nice, there’s a hardware key to lock the screen position.
Youtube application wasn’t able to show a single video. Don’t know if it’s the flash fight Apple & Adobe currently have, but it didn’t work.
Tried the Safari web browser. The UI is very simple, I guess it’s the same as what iPhone /iPod Touch has. To me it was a bit of a pain – we searched for a free books in the internet (Project Guthenberg) and were able to find them, but we couldn’t come up with a way to save a file from the browser. In the end we did find out that holding your finger long on a link it’ll open a short menu including ‘copy’. Then you can open the PDF viewer, tell it to find a book from the internet, then do some magic to paste the previously copied URL to the address field to download the PDF. Easy? Not at all..
The hardware button on the front takes me always to the main menu/main view. I didn’t try what happens if one presses it longer. As you can run only one app at the time, you’ll be using this a lot. As iPad doesn’t do multitasking (as far as I know it means that you cannot listen to music while reading a book and so on..), you keep starting and closing applications all the time. I guess this is the reason why a PDF reader has to know how to download PDF files from a given URL, has it’s own download manager and so on.
Appstore having huge amounts of cool applications for iPad, it must be a neat device and many people will enjoy it.
It’s understandable that Apple wants to generate as much money as possible but it must be at least equally understandable that I have problems with the way they do it.
At this stage I tell you that this iPad isn’t mine. Someone I know bought one from US and I had the possibility to play with it for around 15 minutes.
I guess that after using Openmoko Freerunner for almost 2 years now, I’d very soon get frustrated with the limitations Apple has set for it’s devices. Having to pay for almost every software, not being even able to start it without Windows or Mac OS, move files over with Linux, not having multitasking, not being able to SSH in it, not being to install any app I or someone else has written and so on. They generate money and make slick devices, but the rest is not fair play.
One question I came up with while using it – can I run Openstreetmap instead of Google maps? Yes, I can.
I need to do soon something with the theme my blog uses.. the content area isn’t wide enough for Youtube videos :/
Related posts:
- Apple iPad Apple announced their tablet device, iPad two days ago. Immediately...
Youtube on the iPad is nothing to do with flash. It connects directly to the H.264 video file the same way the HTML5 version of youtube does it.
What does this have to do with Ubuntu ?
Absolutely NOTHING.
Few comments for the device. Firstly multitasking in this case is not that obvious as one might think. Because you can listen to music and read an e-book at the same time, but if the application that you start requires sound it will pause the music.
Secondly there is an application for SSH http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/issh-ssh-vnc-console/id287765826?mt=8 I recommend to check it out. It’s quite neat.
Thridly about the menu button. If press it a long time it shows you music controls and if you hold menu button and I/O button at the same time device takes a screenshot.
Fourthly the YouTube Flash player wont work, but as said earlier every YouTube video is encoded with .H264 codec to .mp4 container, which makes the videos QuickTime “compatible”.
In overall good points about what could be improved.
Thanks Jimbo, Fabian & Toni for your comments & corrections.
I forgot that Youtube also provides H.264 – but still, the Youtube application didn’t show any videos to me, don’t know what’s the reason.
Multitasking, ok so it’s kind of partial multitasking. Good for the users.
SSH: “not being able to SSH in it” means that I actually would like to have a SSH server running on iPad, not client. This is what I can now do with Freerunner, this is what N900 & other Nokia internet tablets allow you to do.
I guess I need to go and try that menu button again to see the music control. What’s the I/O button by the way?
I meant the power button :)
What comes to the width of your page. Here’s what you need to do:
body .primary {
float:right;
width:600px; (was 500px)
}
#wrapper {
width:860px; (was 760px)
}
Kind of a quick fix, you wuold need to change the background image too.
Fabian, it has not, looks more like an apple product review. I hope that it was a mistake that it popped up on Planet Ubuntu.
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Hi there, its understandable piece of writing along with this YouTube video; I can’t believe that one can not understand this straightforward article having with video demonstration.
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