(Insert stupid Blog name here)

So how is it? I'm thinking of finally taking the plunge this weekend. I'm being left behind by all the phones, pads, apps and other stuff. I think an iPad would make a great sketchbook, portable recording device, HDDVD movie transfer device, and vehicle to help bring me into the 21st century.

 

And how was the burger?

The burger was very good, although don't get their regular burger - it's a double-patty monster, and just turns the buns into a soggy mess. Get the "small", which is the same burger with one patty. Fries were excellent, but they give you way, way too many of them. You can never finish them, and even if you could, they'd be cold by the time you got through them all (there must have been five potatoes worth in the bag).

 

The iPad is a pretty cool piece of tech. The screen is gorgeous, and you can sort-of get used to typing on it, although you can't touch-type on it, so it's a little weird going back to having to watch the keyboard when I type, then looking up at what I was typing to see if the iPad got it right. The lack of arrow keys on the keyboard would frustrate me to no end (I've had to deal with this on the iPhone for years). If I used it a lot for inputting text, I'd get a bluetooth keyboard.

 

It's heavier than you'd expect, so if you don't have a way to prop it up or set it down when using it for an extended period of time, I suspect your thumbs would get pretty tired.

 

The key to the iPad or anything like it is the software. If there is software available that makes the device useful to you, then it's worth getting. That's what made the iPhone a winner for me - that while I rarely use the phone part of it (and it is a good phone, despite AT&T's network), I've found dozens of apps and games that make it a pretty useful secondary computing device, and a great portable time-waster.

 

There are some nice drawing apps, and if you get something like the Wacom Bamboo stylus for it, it would make a nice sketchbook (there are some people at work using it for that all the time).

 

The drawback to it over an iPhone is portability. Yes - it's more portable than a laptop, but it's something you can't simply shove in your pocket and take with you everywhere. The benefit though is the screen size. Everything is easier to see on the iPad, and therefore it's a more capable device for certain tasks. Plus, the worse my eyes get as I get older, the more trouble I have seeing really tiny type and graphics on the iPhone. The iPad looks to be much easier to read things on.

 

I'd like to get one myself, but at the moment can't justify the expense, and I don't really need one since my iPhone does what I need it to do. But if my iPhone died, I'd immediately go out and get some sort of replacement iDevice for it, because I'm fairly addicted to it now.

 

I'd suggest getting as much storage as you can afford. I find myself constantly filling up my iPhone (it's my primary music player).

A note about drawing on the iPad (or iPhone, for that matter), while it's touch-sensitive, it's not pressure-sensitive. So you can't get the same responsiveness you do from a Wacom tablet. The styluses you can get for it have mushy, eraser-sized tips, because they have to mimic a fingertip. Ten One Design is working on a pressure-sensitive stylus, but as of right now it's just a prototype, and the pressure-sensitivity will be built-in to the pen, meaning apps will have to be updated to work with it.

 

Just for the sake of completion, I'm posting this from my new iPad. Kinda cool.

Nice. Although you should be eating a burger, too.

Would you settle for a burger n fries in a basket created on the iPad with Procreate sketchbook?

 

http://db.tt/0Lc0OszO

 

Tasty!

 

Finger or stylus?

Finger for the time being. It works surprisingly well but I plan on getting a stylus if I can find a decent one. And an HDMI cable so I can use the DV adapter. And an iRig so I can hook up a guitar. And a...you get the idea.

 

That sketch software is a lot of fun. There's something to be said for stripping away all the bloated, unused or unwanted features of Adobe everything and the various 3D apps that do everything including model the kitchen sink. It's the digital equivalent of reaching for a box of 24 Crayola crayons. Not the 64 pack and certainly not the 120 pack. You just don't need all those crayons.

This is way cool. I hope Apple implements something like this...

 

That is slick. I wonder if it works as well on the iPhone and Touch - that might be the reason Apple's not done something like it already.