So I took the plunge and ordered and iPad and I swore me an oath in the blood of unborn swans that I would not, ever be a pain about it.
Sorry, swans.
Basically, look, here’s the thing: it’s bloody stupendous.For those of you who care, the OS is a slightly tweaked version of the iPhone OS, with an infinitely more fluid feel. The landscape format version of Mail looks like the one on your Mac, the portrait one has a dropdown inbox which is rather stylish. Games are hugely addictive. iBooks is great and Kindle for iPad is nicer than Kindle for Kindle. TV and movies are lovely. I find the keyboard perfectly acceptable; there’s a period of learning as you adjust to the smaller size and a slight oddness in hand position you need to adopt to let the pads of your fingers absorb the hardness of the screen. I’ve already written a thousand words of my next novel on it. Or you can use a remote keyboard if you can be bothered. This is something I can carry instead of a laptop and be okay most of the time.
Yes, there are problems, and no, they don’t really matter very much. What it adds is still vastly more impressive than what it cannot do, and as we know from experience with Apple, they tend to come along later and fix the things we whinge about. In this respect it is identical to my iPhone experience: everything you have heard which is bad is true up to a point, and all those things are simply eclipsed by the other things you have heard about which are better than you’ve been told.
From a writing perspective…
Well, as I say, I’ve already started using it for work. It’s interesting to me to be working on the paired down version of Pages (which works fine, by the way) because I’ve recently been using Scrivener and WriteRoom. The lack of whistles and bells doesn’t bug me – in fact it’s rather welcome. I don’t need software suggesting grammar modifications. I don’t want a multitude of fonts. I want a screen and a keyboard and somewhere they serve tea. The fact that the iPad doesn’t multitask (much) means I don’t either, and that’s all to the good. I actually rather prefer this version of Pages to the main one, which somehow honks me off because it always seems to be telling me I could be doing more with my life.
My evil masterplan: travel with a portable projector and a bluetooth keyboard and project my book twelve by nine onto my hotel room wall. Eat that, Minority Report!
Battery life? So far, so good, although I will confess first that I haven’t been using 3G – I wanted to try living without it, and I found that quite acceptable – and perhaps more relevant: I’m used to nurturing the battery of my iPhone, so I automatically switch the iPad over to Airplane Mode whenever I’m not using it. And why not?
More profoundly, the touchscreen thing is a powerful change to the way we work. It is physical in a way our interactions with data conventionally are not. I do quite want a stylus option, actually, but perhaps that will come. The sense of being able to point at stuff with your actual hand, move your finger and feel that you’re affecting the electronic world directly, is very pleasing and primal. The only frustration is that I want more. I want to be able to reach through the screen. I want to feel the depth, not just the surface. I want, basically, a TARDIS-like fishtank full of warm District 9 goo which will take my instructions. I want to be able to stammer out my story ideas and have them come back nicely typeset… but look, this will do in the mean time.
Verdict: this is a dinosaur killer. It takes a bite out of laptops and netbooks and looms menacingly over the Kindle. It doesn’t even stop to wipe its feet on Sony’s Reader, which is the e-reader device with the greatest market penetration in the UK – or, probably, was until last week. It sets the bar. Yes, there will be later versions. Yes, there will be competitors. Yes, it’s an Apple device, with all the lock-in attendant thereunto. Yes, it is a shiny, stylised bit of techno-nonsense which you do not really need because actually all anyone needs is a strip of green land to farm, a couple of goats and a supply of clean water.
But assuming that we’re not in Subsistenceville: this is a lifestyle device with teeth.
