IPad + Business
June 12th, 2010 Posted in UncategorizedNow that I have the IPad what do I do with it? Besides being a cool way to read the morning newspaper and stream content from my Netflix account I want to use this thing for business. So far there are a few apps that have gotten me close to leaving the laptop in the bag, at least when I am in a hurry. The Apple apps for email, contacts and calendar are great for a quick lookup of a contact or short reply to an email. Having used touchscreen keyboards for a while now the conversion to a larger one was quite simple, actually I can probably type 30 -35 words a minute on it. Nowhere near what I can do on my desktop but when you consider I am doing this in a parking lot or restaurant its really quite acceptable.
Getting usable content isn’t as hard as I thought it would be thanks to Good Reader. My initial thought was that I would be syncing all of my tech manuals from our server through ITunes but with Good Reader I was able to create a FTP connection to our knowledge base server and download content as needed.
The lack of flash has not been that noticeable to me at this point, most news and blog sites are not that flash heavy. To me the fact that there is no multitasking creates some usability issues, when I am in an app and want to check a quick email I have to completely exit the app and start over when I go back to it. This does appear to get addressed with the 4.0 update coming out this summer. The only thing I would really liked to have seen is the addition of a stylus, I know you can buy one for the IPad but they aren’t very accurate.
Overall this is a great in between device. The large screen offers better reading and web surfing than my Motorolla Droid and the instant on makes it quicker to start using than my laptop.
-MJS