Drank the iKool-Aid
Well, I finally got myself an Apple thing. I've gone a lot of years without ever buying anything from Apple, but I decided it was time. My boss gave me a Myers gift card with a fairly large sum of money on it for Christmas, so I put it into an iPad.
Now, I'd been thinking about getting an iPhone, but the truth is that I don't like the idea of mucking around on a tiny little smartphone screen, not for the things I anticipate doing with a portable computing device. I want mobile access to email, PDF and eBook reading, some Web access, an MP3 player, without having to set up my 17" mobile workstation. And while I had thought that I was paying about $50 per month on my basic phone bill, my last two bills (at least) have come in at under $20 each, so I'm not so fussed on a $50+ plan to get myself a smartphone.
One day, I'm sure I will get myself a smartphone. I suspect it will be an Android phone when I do, because Android is doing things Apple isn't willing to contemplate. But I'm not so impressed with the current generation of Android tablets, so my tablet of choice is an iPad for now.
So what do I think of it so far? Well, for a start I want to know how Apple got their reputation for devices that just work with well-designed interfaces. Sure, iOS itself is fairly easy to use, but I had a lot of hassles getting the damn thing set up in the first place.
As we all know, iTunes is required to transfer stuff onto an iPad, so first I had to get iTunes onto my computer. There was an ancient version of iTunes there already. Apparently it couldn't update the version directly, and I had to remove the old version manually before installing the new one. The old version took an incredibly long time to uninstall, the new version took an incredibly long time to install, connectivity to Apple's download site was crappy, and multiple reboots were required.
Then, when I finally had iTunes going, I discovered that my iPad wouldn't sync anyway, or do much of anything else. Apparently it was refusing to talk to my computer via either USB or wireless because I didn't yet have a 3G sim card in it. Say what? Okay, many people are probably buying iPads on a mobile carrier's plan or something, but I didn't, and I didn't have time in one day to shop for both an iPad and a mobile broadband plan. That's okay, I thought, it's got its specialised USB cable and WiFi, I'll just use them in the meantime. But no, for some reason Apple decided that connectivity should be disabled when the iPad has no sim. Even now that I have a sim in it, it should not ever have talked to my mobile broadband provider. Why the hell can't I just use my sim-less WiFi+3G iPad as if it were a WiFi iPad?
So, now I've got my iPad up and running. I've had to learn a workaround for a bug in the iOS email client already. I've added a bunch of PDFs I need to familiarise myself with, along with an app that is capable of reading PDFs (because iOS doesn't have that built in). A few other apps, too, about half of which are free. I think the most expensive has been Angry Birds, the only game I had any interest in. I played around with it for a while, getting used to using it, then plugged in the USB cable again to let it recharge. (And it looks like the advice I was given, that it will recharge via USB, was wrong, because it didn't start recharging until I plugged the cable into the power socket adapter and a power board, but that's an issue for another time.)
So, getting back on track with the story, I've got the iPad plugged into my computer's USB port. On its own, the iPad decides to back itself up to my hard drive. Specifically, C:. Now, my laptop is getting a bit dated. It was high-end when I got it four years ago, but today the hard drive really isn't big. As a result, I don't have a lot of space on my system drive, and I don't store data there any more. But the iPad chooses it's own backup location, and dumps 1GB onto my overloaded system drive.
Now, I'm not a light computer user. Damn near everything I do revolves around the use of a computer. An iPad is woefully inadequate to my needs, and that's fine, because it is merely an adjunct to my other stuff. It makes it easier to access certain things, that's all. In that mode, my iPad is never going to be my primary device for anything. Everything I put on it, I will have stored somewhere else as well. In effect, the iPad is my backup (in that it is a secondary copy from which I can restore the original if it gets lost somehow). So now I've got a 1GB backup of a backup, stored on the device which has the primary copy. How bloody useless is that?
So I hunt down the backup, and delete it. I'm guessing I'm going to have to do this every day in which I sync the iPad with my computer, because I'm yet to find a setting to turn this off.
Now that I've got the basic things I need first up and running, the iPad is pretty good to use. I can confirm that it is great for reading PDFs in bed (with the aid of GoodReader). However I still don't get how even the people who are supposed to be the best at making easy-to-use interfaces can make such obvious bad choices. There are better ways to handle these things, ways that don't impact on the users who already have up-to-date copies of iTunes installed, sim cards in their mobile devices, and plenty of space for a dozen copies of their data.