It was time to get a new car for my growing family and so I had to get rid of my 1995 Geo Prizm. I loved that car, but it just wasn’t big enough for the entire family so it had to go. My buyer was looking to sell his iPad so that he would have enough money to buy the car so logically I just said “how bout the iPad for the car?” It worked out and I am the proud new owner of an iPad 2. People have been crazy for the iPad and act like it is the end all device that you can use for everything, but my impressions of its abilities have not changed even after owning one. The iPad just doesn’t fit nicely between my iPhone and my MacBook Pro. Is there really any need for a tablet between those two devices? I have been thinking about what I can use the iPad for to make it really worth the money, but I have not really come up with anything yet. It is really cool and I love watching NetFlix on it, but I do not really see myself using it for GPS in the car and it cannot do things like Hulu unless you subscribe to Hulu plus. The best use I have come up with so far is to put it in the car for my daughter to use for movies. It would be a very good looking screen and we can load the movies to it and get some Bluetooth wireless headphones so it seems like that is the most reasonable use.
There are a couple of things that shocked me about the iPad. First, it does not come with any headphones. Those ear buds that Apple usually provides with iPods and iPhones have got to be really cheap to produce and therefore it seems like an odd exclusion on a $500 tablet. I have my ear buds from my iPhone so there is not really any problem, but if I were getting this device to be in place of the laptop or the iPhone I would definitely need some way of listening to it without using the external speaker. The second thing that seems odd is that my MacBook Pro came with a microfiber cloth to wipe the screen off because it is a glass screen, but it is not a touch screen so in theory it should rarely be necessary. On the other hand, the iPad does not come with anything to wipe the screen off with. I find myself constantly trying to wipe it off with my shirt or something just so that I don’t see all of those awful smudges on the screen. Why would they not include a way to wipe it clean? The Smart Cover certainly would not do the trick because you would really need to wipe the screen to get it clean and from my understanding the Smart Covers also take dirt off of the table and get smashed between the screen and the cover every time you close the cover so it seems like a lose/lose situation.
What are your impressions of the iPad? Have you come to love this Mac in tablet form factor? Does it do everything that you need it to do to take the place of your laptop and do you find that it can really be useful in between an iPhone and a MacBook? Let me know what you think in the comments.
