It first showed it’s true colors when I updated my work MacBook to the latest version of OS X and the whole thing died on me. Pulled every trick in the book to revive it, but alas, it was done for. So while I waited for the sys admin to trying and figure out what to do with it, I relied on the iPad to continue working, and it came through with bright and shining colors.

First off, it saved my ass in being able to email back clients and coordinating work. If that was the only thing I needed to do, it saved my ass. But it went further, and got me on the file sharing network, and I could edit reports with iWork, instant message with the team, update my calendar and more. It was amazing that no one in the office noticed I wasn’t on a laptop only until they came over to ask me a question and realize that I bought the new iPad and ooohed and aaahed in amazement at how thin it is.

But that was work, and now I find myself using this bad boy as my main device at home. I even stopped brining back my work laptop and doing everything I need on the iPad. My favorite use for it is when I go out for a shoot, and want to really see what I got without having to sit at the Mac mini at home in my room. I just plug in the camera connector kit, slide in the SD card, import the photos and I got instant large screen viewing of my pictures. Great for triage, and only keeping the best shots of the day. Also comes in handing when I’m not sure if you got a good shot and can’t tell from the small screen on the camera, I get a better view on a large screen without too much hassle. Though I would love to be able to do some preliminary work on photos right on the device. Rating photos, light and basic touch ups here and there. Would be a great workflow tool before I go in to Aperture on the Mac.

On a day to day basis, I use the iPad for emailing, calendaring, Facebook, Netflix, reading on the kindle, instant messaging and doing some light research and blog updates. With more and more specialized apps that take the interface beyond expectations, I see this as being my main tool and only going back to a laptop or desktop for when I need to do really heavy work like intensive reports and spreadsheets, photo editing and design intensive tasks.

So far, I’m loving this bad boy and how it’s changed the way I do things, and its so much lighter than lugging a laptop around. Best part is you don’t have to take it out of your bag when going through security checks at the airport. Bonus!!

I work in a mixed pc/mac environment using an online task and project management tool, which offers some rudimentary milestone scheduling features, and we use Exchange 2003 for our email and calendaring. I know, its old, and its almost deprecated, but until we upgrade, its what we have. But even if we upgrade it doesn’t solve the problem.

The problem is in open standards adoption of CalDav on Windows/Outlook, and the Mac’s implementation of exchange calendars in iCal and Entourage/Outlook for mac.

Windows and Outlook

In Outlook for Windows, unless your using exchange, there is very little you can do out of the box to get a could synchronized shared calendar solution. Sure you can use google calendar with a plugin, but thats not really ideal now is it.

Mac and iCal

iCal is great and I love it, and use it extensively with MobileMe. I have a whole bunch of calendars synched with my iPhone for scheduling on the go, and i cant live without it.

What gets my goat is that it doesn’t support older versions of exchange. It also frustrates me when sending and accepting meeting requests to pc’s. Its either outlook on windows cant read or open them, or it doesn’t get my meeting request replies. I don’t know if this problem is solved with a newer exchange server or not, but at the moment, is killing me.

Mac and Outlook

I’ve played around with Office 2011 Outlook beta, and i love it. I love how similar to Outlook on PC, and its spectacular. My beef comes down again to the fact it doesn’t support older versions of exchange, and again it doesn’t support CalDav. So i cant get my google or MobileMe calendars on it. Which cripples it severely for me.

I know this is a bit of a rant at the state of things, but it doesn’t seem like there is any planned future updates for some applications to improve this. iCal for mac may get an update soon in the next Mac OS X update that might solve this. I doubt Outlook on Windows will start supporting CalDav anytime soon, coz they would have already. As for Outlook for mac, turns out they left out that feature on purpose because they wanted to concentrate on exchange functionality first. So it maybe an added feature in future update. But until then, i cant use it much.

Anyone have any ideas or suggestions on getting a working Mac/Windows shared calendaring experience going smoothly?

My 1st annoyance was the keyboard. Its a great keyboard but I found that if you didn’t have the Apple case/kick-stand, it was really hard to type on it. When  holding it in portrait mode, it was awkward to type long messages with both my thumbs as I held it in my hands, and landscape mode just was a pain as it challenged my thumbs reach.

It was very pleasant to sit on the balcony in the mornings and go through all my news in Google Reader. The touch navigation was a dream and it really made reading the news an immersive experience. Viewing and sharing pictures was also very immersive. Navigating photos and showing them to friends was definitely a more enjoyable experience than showcasing them on a laptop, as I could pass it around and they can interact with it, as if a real set of photos.

Prolonged use of the iPad, though, was a bit of a mixed bag. Trying to hold it for long periods of time, while watching a movie or tv show put a lot of strain on the hands and arms. Laying in bed and kicking back to watch a 1hour TV show proved a lil frustrating as leaning it on my thighs left it at an awkward viewing angle, and holding it was just not fun. Again, this out have been a different experience if I had the $40 Apple iPad case. I think that the case should have come standard with the iPad as it would have solved a lot of physical usability issues, but I guess Apple knew this and decided to sell it separately because of its necessity.

I was quite disappointed that a lot of the apps I used on a regular basis from large companies was not updated for the iPad (Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, MobileMe Gallery, Skype) and a few required me to buy a whole new version of the app at full price (Things). I understand that if they did develop an iPad app, it would have an updated UI and a very different experience, but a lot of apps have been ported over very easily and quickly by other developers and they’ve done a great job at iPad specific versions (Evernote, Dropbox,WordPress). I guess the wait is for the iPad version of iOS4.

I had the wifi only version, and only being able to use it at home or the office, I thought that its usefulness is tied to a data connection. Most apps are tied to the net and if you dont have connectivity, the iPad really isn’t much use.

All in all, the iPad is a great device. Its performance was impressive, the UI was solid and the feel and sturdiness of the device was great. At the moment though, until a few of my favourite apps are ported over, and iOS4 comes out giving it multi-tasking and a few other features, it feels more like a fun toy and not something I will use on a regular basis. I found my self reverting to my Macbook Pro to do a lot of tasks, as I am a heaving multi-tasker. iOS4′s new features are going to be a welcome upgrade and I will look in to it as soon as it comes out, probably a 3G version.

Do you have an iPad, and how long did it take you to get used to it? Do you have the Apple Case? How does the keyboard feel for you?

I’m actually quite impressed with the product, and think its a great piece of technology. It seems to me that this device is not a netbook, and it’s not a laptop, and it’s not a smartphone, and it’s not a full fledged tablet PC. It’s a tablet device for the consumption, and light content creation, a portable media player (PMP) that has a platform for developers.

There is controversy over the lack of multi-tasking, and I agree, a device of this size and capabilities should by all means be able to do more than one thing at a time, but when the purpose of the device is to focus on the current media at hand eg: reading a book, watching a movie, or surfing the web, then it seems to me a valid point. If you were to want to do more than that, you would use a laptop or a desktop with a larger screen, more comfortable keyboard and specialized apps.

I am not impressed with the fact that it doesn’t have a front facing camera, and that for some reason, Apple seems to have forgotten about iChat recently. It used to be touted as one of its flagship software products, available on all macs, but sorely missed in its portable products. The iPad would have a good place for it, what with the capable cpu and larger screen, but really, when it comes down to it, it would be a pain to hold that thing up while you go for a 20 min video chat session with someone.

Then there is the lack of Flash, and though its a deal breaker for most, I’m not really fussed with it. Sure, it would be nice to watch all the videos on websites that stream in flash. But then there are sites that use Silverlight, and then all the other plugins. I hope with the advancement of HTML 5 and its adoption now by the biggest video content deliverer, Youtube, followed by Vimeo, soon, we will not need Flash for something as ubiquitous as video. And for those websites that are developed in Flash, for a “Enhanced User Experience”, I never liked you. You annoy me! Big time!!

So thats my two cents. The iPad wasn’t a totally jaw dropping announcement, with a few missing features, but a very promising future I believe.

What do you think?