Netflix App on iPad

Netflix's app for the iPad is amazing. The picture quality is excellent and there are SO MANY movies that you can view for free. I have a 10 Mbit connection with Comcast so the streaming is amazing. Every once in a while I switch out my one movie that comes in the mail but I mostly use it for the free movies online.

LogMeIn

www.logmein.com is a wonderful website. It allows you to download free software onto your computer which allows you to take over that computer (Mac or PC) from any browser. There are even apps for your iPhone and iPad called LogMeIn Ignition to take over your remote computer. You control it remotely as if you were right in front of it. Excellent!

There are corporate editions of LogMeIn Pro that you can remote control or do remote support for all the computers in your workplace. It isn't free but works great. They even have LogMeIn Rescue that with cooperation from the user on the remote computer, you can remotely control their computer without first downloading the software. But LogMeIn Rescue is about $1000.

iBooks and Kindle apps for iPad

Since graduate school, I've been a big book reader but I have found certain books that I like to read over and over.  One is the Bible.  Two I just started reading over and over again are "The Practice of the Presence of God" and the "Richest Man in Babylon".  They are both more practical books, teaching life skills.  The reason I like the iPad with these two apps are that I can carry several books with me.  It doesn't take up any more room or increase the weight I carry if I have 2 books or 20 books.  I just downloaded "Acres of Diamonds" and have started reading it.  It is starting to sound like a book I'll want to review often.

When you have books you want to read once and then give away, I don't think the book apps would be that great.  If you have a set of books that need to soak in with frequent readings, these apps are incredible.

ABC app on iPad

The ABC television app is amazing. High definition television. You can access any episode from any season of the popular programs. I've started watching "Lost" from the beginning. Very cool.

Movies on iPad

Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, said that iPads had to do certain things better than other devices to become their own product class. IPads do movies incredibly well. There is something amazing about carrying a very good sized screen with incredible resolution that only weighs 1.5 lbs in your hand. I recently bought Avatar on iTunes and even though I originally saw it in 3D in the theatre, I didn't feel let down watching it on the iPad. The picture quality was so clear.

WiFi iPad with rooted Droid

On www.droid-life.com, you can follow video instructions to give yourself superuser/administrator access to your Droid.  It is also called root access.  After you do that, you can install Barnacle Tether app on your Droid to make your droid into a wireless hot spot.  Pretty cool.  I use it to make my iPad more mobile.  I could also use it with my MacBook.  There is a less scary app called PDANet that you can connect to your Droid from MacBook to go out on the internet using BlueTooth or the USB cable.  That solution didn't work for the iPad so I took the risk and rooted my Droid.  Basically you replace your factory defaults that are saved on the Droid with Android OS 2.1 with root access.  Then you restore your phone to this version of Android OS instead of your factory defaults.

Goodreader on the iPad

Another great app on the iPad is Goodreader. You can use it to copy PDF documents to your iPad and to read them on your iPad. It has several different methods to copy them and manage the documents. I used the wifi option to copy PDFs from my MacBook.

Safari on the iPad

http://www.apple.com/ipad/guided-tours/

I have really grown to love using Safari on the iPad. I love using my fingers to click, move and adjust pages. If the type is too small to accurately click the correct hyperlink, you can resize the page with a pinch (reverse pinch) to make the text larger. It is so great to pull out my 1.5 lb iPad with the large screen wherever there is wifi to jump on the web. No booting. The iPad is just ON instantly and away I go. I even did payroll with an Internet-based payroll service the other day.

Bloomberg app on iPad

This app is excellent, especially the charting. Very clear with lots of options on timeframes. You can track your own stocks. Plenty of relevant news.

An app NOT to get for iPad

One app you don't want is iDisplay which is supposed to extend your display to the iPad like a third monitor. The iPad can only be upright (not landscape) and when the mouse get over onto the iPad, it goes REALLY slow, lagging behind your actual movement by several seconds. You also have to fire up the image again on your Mac to choose uninstall or your Mac still thinks you have three screens.

iPad email and photos; static memory

iPad email simplicity of use and quick response in deleting emails and moving to the next email creates the DESIRE in me to use my iPad to go through my emails on it rather than my MacBook. Steve Jobs was right. Just doing it better creates a platform for iPads to become another computing class. It is the multi-touchscreen that separates it from a previous tablets.

Photos - they look so amazing on the iPad. It has made me want to go back through my photos just to see what they look like full-screen. I just kept through picture after picture, amazed at how they looked.

Something else that I am beginning to appreciate about the iPad is that it doesn't boot up and the programs don't seem to load, everything is just there. I never realized how cool that was. I think all computers should move to solid state drives (flash memory). A little piece of history, in 1988, I was about to purchase a Dell computer that the main memory of the computer was static memory (the technology behind solid state drives, flash memory, and memory sticks). Then there was an embargo on Japanese static memory and we had to pay the same price for dynamic memory. I never got the computer with static memory. The power of static memory is that you could have a power failure and your computer would just come back to where you were because the memory never cleared. No more lost spreadsheets or school papers or huge documents vaporized because someone kicked the power plug.

iPad

I have been reading everything on www.apple.com/ipad for the last couple months since I watched the Keynote Address from Steve Jobs.

LIGHTWEIGHT AND EASY TO CARRY AROUND
Even though Steve said that the NetBooks don't do anything better, they did do "light weight" and "easy to carry around" very well.  After getting my MacBook Pro, I immediately missed the lightness of my Dell Mini 10 (I had given it to my daughter).  But I was addicted to Macs' consistent operation and  quick response.  I hoped the iPad would give me Apple's amazing experience in the "light weight" and "easy to carry around" world.  I was not disappointed.  The iPad only weighs 1.5 lbs and is extremely thin.

USING MY FINGERS
The first thing that I didn't anticipate was how fast my brain would get addicted to using my fingers for everything.  There is no mouse.  If you want something to move, go, start, or change size, you touch it with your fingers.  I had only been playing with (I mean 'using') my iPad for about 10 minutes when I was called by my son for me to fix his Dell Mini 10.  There was a virus message that popped up from someone's site on FaceBook.  I IMMEDIATELY started to touch the screen to do things but OF COURSE, that didn't do anything.  I cancelled out all the virus warnings (the trick of these virus warnings is to get you to try to stop the virus you don't have yet and in that effort, give yourself the virus) and then ran Microsoft Security Essentials to clean out the virus.  No virus had been installed.

I went back to my iPad and start touching everything again.  So much fun!

CRISP DISPLAY and INSTANT RESPONSE
In the store, I had been reading up on the iPad so much that I just wanted to verify the resolution and the speed of response.  I was impressed.  The picture on the screen is incredibly crisp and clear.  When you click on an icon, the app appeared.  It doesn't hesitate.  Just boom!  I bought the iPad right away.

SAFARI
Safari for touchscreen is so much fun.  You are adjusting, moving and changing web pages with your fingers.  This process came to me pretty quick because I had been using my Droid smartphone for almost a month already.

MULTI-DIRECTIONAL DISPLAY
The screen changes with you EVERY direction.  When listening to music while using the iPad, I liked the speakers on the top so I just used the iPad upside-down.  Everything except some iPhone apps just flipped over and worked seamlessly.  You can be looking at something on your iPad, flip it to show someone, the images flip for them quickly and then you flip it back to yourself to keep going.

MAIL
I was thinking, how can they make email cooler.  Manipulating emails with your fingers on a big screen is the difference.  Pictures load and look gorgeous but moving through emails and going through your individual emails with your fingers enhances the experience.  You touch 'reply symbol' and reply window pops up with your electronic keyboard.  Takes a little bit to get used to typing on glass because the keys don't go down but the iPad clicks to let you know you are actually doing something.  It isn't like typing on a full-size keyboard with your fingers sitting on asdf and jkl; but you get the job done.  You'll need the external keyboard dock or bluetooth keyboard if you want to type long documents.

VIDEO
175 songs and one full-length movie copied from my MacBook to the iPad in less than 2 minutes.  I clicked on my one movie that I had purchased from iTunes.  It started right up but get this, it started where I left off watching it on my MacBook.  Whoa!  Very clear picture.  The movie was in very wide screen so I did have black sections above and below the movie but it was so cool to be walking in the house while watching a movie.

IPOD
It was really easy to access my music and select by artist, album, genre, etc.  The sound from the speaker comes out of three little holes on the bottom edge.  The sound was very clear and I was willing to listen to my music just from the tiny speaker.  Finally I plugged in my ear buds but it wasn't necessary.  Incredible!  So I could keep working at my desk, I unplugged the ear buds and just listened to music from the little speaker with the huge sound.  You can turn your iPad whichever direction you want the speaker to point and work on something else.  The music keeps going while you use other apps on the iPad.

I'll note more as I keep using the iPad.  Like another reviewer noted, no Flash Player which stops some websites dead and makes them unusable on the iPad.  Also, when I wanted to type up this blog and I clicked in this box to start typing, the iPad didn't know this was a mini editor and didn't bring up the keyboard for me to start typing.  I'll figure that out but I had to write this blog with my MacBook.