"I used it for a day and a half and think that it will be an excellent couch companion PC"
and
"This version isn't a replacement PC for anyone yet, but future versions might be. You probably want to save your cash until then."
and I roll my eyes. If the casual browsing bit sounds good to you and you have the extra scratch, do yourself a favor and buy this thing now or you'll be screwing yourself out of 1-2 years of an awesome cutting edge experience.
I do agree with him that user profiles should be implemented, but his other complaints are nit-picky. I personally think the lack of Flash is a feature, not a problem, considering I have flash block installed on all my browsers. If Apple had included flash support, it'd be very unlikely that they'd have provided a flash blocker, so I'm actually very grateful that they made this decision. In my opinion, flash is only good for two things: games and videos; and I tend to avoid both of those things when I surf anyways.
As far as the keyboard goes, I can actually type on the damn thing almost as fast as I can my laptop keyboard, but that's probably because I'm so awesome. I do, however, often find it hard to get into a good position for typing, however, since I'm usually using the iPad in some obscenely relaxed pose.
I'm a total Apple fanboy and in love with my iPad though, so take what I say with a grain of salt.
I also roll my eyes when people compare it to a PC replacement. It's not, just like your xbox or nintendo ds is not a pc replacement. It's an entertainment device.
The problem is that we see web surfing and think it must be done on a Work Machine (tm). And therefore we also need to be able to edit word docs, answer our bosses emails, video conference on skype, etc.
Nope. It's about having some time to play games, read a book, browse the web, watch a video, glance through your pictures at a leisurely (singletasked) pace. If you expect it to replace a PC then just get a tablet PC or an android phone with a terminal. But that's not what most people want to do for fun.
Is the browsing experience really better than the iPhone, or is it just faster? There are things that annoy me on the iPhone, but screen size has never been one of them. I wish my phone had the computing power of the iPad...
Definitely better... No question. I actually prefer it to the desktop because of the double tap to center and zoom your screen on a paragraph of text or a picture. Using the iPad for a while and then going back to the iPhone makes me feel like the phone is a toy. This device is actually letting me read some PDFs that I have been putting off for a while because reading PDFs on the computer screen is just so damn inconvenient. Reading it on the iPad is very sharp and overall a good user experience.
I do wish this thing had competing web browsers like chrome and opera but safari is ok for now.
There’s just something about surfing the Web
using Safari on the iPad. It feels different,
somehow. Apple’s marketing pitch says “it’s
like holding the Internet in your hands,” and
while that’s a little bit cheesy, it’s not
far off. There’s just something different about
holding that Web page in your hands, rather
than seeing it on a desktop or laptop PC, or on
a tiny iPhone screen. Tapping on links doesn’t
feel the same as clicking on them with a mouse.
It’s a good feeling.
"I personally think the lack of Flash is a feature, not a problem, considering I have flash block installed on all my browsers."
That's contradictory. If you think that the lack of Flash is a feature, then why do you have it installed at all on your computer? The mere fact that you use Flashblock means that while you don't always want to see Flash applets, there are cases in which you do want to see them.
I occasionally watch a video if the description is compelling enough, but more often than not the only videos you find are humorous or better off being text. I enable flash so rarely these days that I might as well uninstall it. Also, the majority of the videos I run across are on YouTube anyways, and other than them the three sources of video I use the most are netflix, Hulu, and TED, all if which are iPad compatible.
"I used it for a day and a half and think that it will be an excellent couch companion PC"
and
"This version isn't a replacement PC for anyone yet, but future versions might be. You probably want to save your cash until then."
and I roll my eyes. If the casual browsing bit sounds good to you and you have the extra scratch, do yourself a favor and buy this thing now or you'll be screwing yourself out of 1-2 years of an awesome cutting edge experience.
I do agree with him that user profiles should be implemented, but his other complaints are nit-picky. I personally think the lack of Flash is a feature, not a problem, considering I have flash block installed on all my browsers. If Apple had included flash support, it'd be very unlikely that they'd have provided a flash blocker, so I'm actually very grateful that they made this decision. In my opinion, flash is only good for two things: games and videos; and I tend to avoid both of those things when I surf anyways.
As far as the keyboard goes, I can actually type on the damn thing almost as fast as I can my laptop keyboard, but that's probably because I'm so awesome. I do, however, often find it hard to get into a good position for typing, however, since I'm usually using the iPad in some obscenely relaxed pose.
I'm a total Apple fanboy and in love with my iPad though, so take what I say with a grain of salt.