iPad -- is a tablet PC / slate PC. In a sleek slim body, all there are the large LCD screen and the simple Home button. On it sides, there are the power-off button, volume adjustment button, and lock screen button. You would start pressing the on/off button, the lock screen appears, where the slide switch prompts you to start the system.
It shows the screen then, with a nice click sound, then you see the icons of applications. In the Photos application, when you have the photos, lists of thumbnails appear. If there are more that do not fit the screen, you must roll over to scroll the screen. In iPad, you would do it with sliding your finger on the screen up or downwards.
That is one of the beauty of iPad. Any size, no matter how many items on the screen, you would be able to access it by scrolling in such a manner, sliding it with your fingers. This is much more real, with the gravity, the speed at which the screen scrolls. The momentum, with which the screen go, makes the screen like a heavy object that you would move it with such an ease. This is much nicer than you would expect, going through the page. Slide -- roll over -- and stop.
Only the trouble is, the scroll bar does not work, it only shows you the location of the screen, not functional. And Just our fingers are too clumsy in pointing the right spot, it would be hard to jump to the right spot by moving the slider, even with the functionality is implemented. The obvious consequence of the lack of this functionality is that you would have to scroll the whole page to look at the items on the bottom. There is no way to organize the photos with tags and such.
There are more critical flaws in this application. For some reason, the photos are not erasable, the delete button does not work on any of the photos no matter how you download them on to iPad. No rotation, no arrangement of photos, nothing to do on the photos, nor their attributes. The same applies to music files. There simply is no way to do anything on them except for making list of your favorite pieces of music.
iPad has an amazing way of dealing with enlarge / shrink the sizes of images. The screen detects pressure from multiple locations, and it has much celebrated zoom functionalities, where you can zoom in the image with pinching the image and zoom out with doing the opposite. Together with moving the image with sliding your fingers on, this works in a miraculous way in such application as GoogleMap. Navigation of the map in this way, is such that you would be saying -- why it was not that way before? If you would like to see the satellite image of the location, the switch is hidden "under" the map. Click on the right bottom of the page and there you will find it.
iBooks is such an application that I tried to grab the page by holding the upper-right corner of iPad. The virtual reality, the feels of it seems to play more in the the process of recognizing objects -- just by the way it turns the pages, the reading is more -- real. They say, the devil is in the details. So much is true for those gadgets. In the most subtle ways, it appeals to senses, here and there, and adds up to reality. I do not read to turn pages, for sure. Yet, when I do, the mere gesture of it gets to the point where the perception of the objects makes sense, in that it prompts, to be, submerged in the act of reading.
One of the most major drawback of iPad is perhaps that the OS is capable of single task, not multi-task. Every application must be closed before moving on to another. While it is possible to play iPod music while reading iBooks, Youtube application cuts off downloading when you close the application. In the next version of OS, multi-tasking seems to be coming, according to some sources.
Typing in texts in iPad, with its virtual keyboard is a bit tricky but can be done. It would be better if it has arrow keys, since moving the cursor by pointing at locations on the screen is rather hard if not impossible, it lands at somewhere a little way off from where it is expected. In case with typing in Japanese characters, conversion is done with enlisting the candidates on top of the virtual keyboard and by selecting any one of them. There seems to be no way to register new conversion, so there is another area that can be improved. The conversion itself gained some reputations already among users, that they have good dictionaries for prompting words that is more likely to be used.
Saving iPad files to PC must be done via iTunes. It starts synchronizing the files when iPad is connected to PC via USB cable. Only the trouble I had is with having the desktop machine and the notebook synchronized at the same time. Selecting the wrong option, the files would be eliminated on the iPad and on PC.
iPad is revolutionary. Some companies such as HP and Toshiba, declared that they will have their versions of tablet PC / slate PC in near future. Since such companies as Nokia and Microsoft, tried to sell theirs without this success, the credit must go with Apple's apps, for PDA. They are good, yet not without bugs, unimplemented features and inconveniences, some of them are critical. Let's hope the Apple developer team would answer our claims and make iPad even better.
It shows the screen then, with a nice click sound, then you see the icons of applications. In the Photos application, when you have the photos, lists of thumbnails appear. If there are more that do not fit the screen, you must roll over to scroll the screen. In iPad, you would do it with sliding your finger on the screen up or downwards.
That is one of the beauty of iPad. Any size, no matter how many items on the screen, you would be able to access it by scrolling in such a manner, sliding it with your fingers. This is much more real, with the gravity, the speed at which the screen scrolls. The momentum, with which the screen go, makes the screen like a heavy object that you would move it with such an ease. This is much nicer than you would expect, going through the page. Slide -- roll over -- and stop.
Only the trouble is, the scroll bar does not work, it only shows you the location of the screen, not functional. And Just our fingers are too clumsy in pointing the right spot, it would be hard to jump to the right spot by moving the slider, even with the functionality is implemented. The obvious consequence of the lack of this functionality is that you would have to scroll the whole page to look at the items on the bottom. There is no way to organize the photos with tags and such.
There are more critical flaws in this application. For some reason, the photos are not erasable, the delete button does not work on any of the photos no matter how you download them on to iPad. No rotation, no arrangement of photos, nothing to do on the photos, nor their attributes. The same applies to music files. There simply is no way to do anything on them except for making list of your favorite pieces of music.
iPad has an amazing way of dealing with enlarge / shrink the sizes of images. The screen detects pressure from multiple locations, and it has much celebrated zoom functionalities, where you can zoom in the image with pinching the image and zoom out with doing the opposite. Together with moving the image with sliding your fingers on, this works in a miraculous way in such application as GoogleMap. Navigation of the map in this way, is such that you would be saying -- why it was not that way before? If you would like to see the satellite image of the location, the switch is hidden "under" the map. Click on the right bottom of the page and there you will find it.
iBooks is such an application that I tried to grab the page by holding the upper-right corner of iPad. The virtual reality, the feels of it seems to play more in the the process of recognizing objects -- just by the way it turns the pages, the reading is more -- real. They say, the devil is in the details. So much is true for those gadgets. In the most subtle ways, it appeals to senses, here and there, and adds up to reality. I do not read to turn pages, for sure. Yet, when I do, the mere gesture of it gets to the point where the perception of the objects makes sense, in that it prompts, to be, submerged in the act of reading.
One of the most major drawback of iPad is perhaps that the OS is capable of single task, not multi-task. Every application must be closed before moving on to another. While it is possible to play iPod music while reading iBooks, Youtube application cuts off downloading when you close the application. In the next version of OS, multi-tasking seems to be coming, according to some sources.
Typing in texts in iPad, with its virtual keyboard is a bit tricky but can be done. It would be better if it has arrow keys, since moving the cursor by pointing at locations on the screen is rather hard if not impossible, it lands at somewhere a little way off from where it is expected. In case with typing in Japanese characters, conversion is done with enlisting the candidates on top of the virtual keyboard and by selecting any one of them. There seems to be no way to register new conversion, so there is another area that can be improved. The conversion itself gained some reputations already among users, that they have good dictionaries for prompting words that is more likely to be used.
Saving iPad files to PC must be done via iTunes. It starts synchronizing the files when iPad is connected to PC via USB cable. Only the trouble I had is with having the desktop machine and the notebook synchronized at the same time. Selecting the wrong option, the files would be eliminated on the iPad and on PC.
iPad is revolutionary. Some companies such as HP and Toshiba, declared that they will have their versions of tablet PC / slate PC in near future. Since such companies as Nokia and Microsoft, tried to sell theirs without this success, the credit must go with Apple's apps, for PDA. They are good, yet not without bugs, unimplemented features and inconveniences, some of them are critical. Let's hope the Apple developer team would answer our claims and make iPad even better.