With all of the buzz surrounding the release of the iPad 2 it occurred to me that I had never tried to use the iPad 1 we have in the office for anything non trivial. Having some Professional Development Leave coming I decided to take the iPad on a road trip and try and do some real work on it. This is not an objective test with a lot of numbers, but my subjective view as to my ability to do work while traveling. I did install some specialized software but mostly used the Safari browser.
Research
The ability to have a full browser was great and terrible all at the same time. On my android phone I don’t expect much from the browser and have specialized apps for many things that simply will not work in the browser. Safari on the iPad was frustrating because it almost worked. LastPass is a good example of this. While you can download LastPass for iPad and it does work it works differently than on a normal browser. There is an “iPad tab” that must be launched which is basically a version of Safari with LastPass. There must be a way to integrate the two but since I was in a hurry ant wanted things to “just work” I suffered through the mediocre UI. Once installed I was able to access various databases. These actually worked okay. The main problem I had was with exporting the data.
Citation databases such as RefWorks or Endnote are buggy on the iPad. I could not find a way to make LastPass work with the new tab in Safari. If the database provides an option to email yourself the article this works well. If not there can be issues.
Data Storage
By far the biggest drawback of the iPad is the difficulty in getting documents on and off. I used Dropbox to get around this issue and it worked very well when it worked. Dropbox works a little differently on the iPad in that it does not seem to create a folder that is always available but rather depends on having a connection before dowloading the item. There are ways to get around this but the default behavior left me without access to the documents I had saved for reading on the train which had no Wi-Fi. The same issue was apparent with Instapaper. Once again there are ways around this but you have to know that ahead of time.
Word Processing
Another issue with the iPad that I found was the lack of a word processing app. I had not downloaded Pages and did all my writing in Google Docs. This was hit or miss since the default interface is not the full interface so that there is no spell check or formating available unless you invoke the badly named “Desktop” mode. This allows you to see the tools you expect.
UI
While IOS is generally very intuitive there are some features I just don’t get. Copy and Paste is rather difficult if not impossible. The pinch feature is nice but it could be more intuitive with a way for displays to be automatically optimized. YouTube is a perfect example of this. While you can make a video full sized easily you need two hands to bring it back to normal size for navigation. Couldn’t there be a default that once it has finished playing the player returns to regular size? The keyboard on screen is surprisingly useful. I was expecting to need an external one and for extended use I would but for a 3 day jaunt it worked pretty well.
Pros
Battery life: The fact that you can get 10 hours out of this thing was by far the most impressive technological feat for the iPad. It works very well for a long time.
Connectivity: I had a wi-fi only option and never had any issues connecting to a network.
Weight: It is heavier than you think but definitely easier to grab than a notebook.
Video: As long as you don’t have to watch flash YouTube works very well.
Cons
See above
Conclusions
For research I found the iPad to be a mixed bag. It has many strengths but ultimately I found it cumbersome to to its unfamiliar UI. I think if you are used to IOS this can be easily overcome. With the right apps and a Bluetooth keyboard this device is definitely better than nothing. It is also better than just a smartphone when it comes to typing. For myself I would much rather have a a netbook with a full OS. The weight difference is negligible and everything works.
ITIG Blog Contributor:
Edward Iglesias
Systems Librarian
Central Connecticut State University
