Posts Tagged ‘ipad’

I recently had to upgrade my iPad because a lot of the apps have stopped working on it. It has had a good four years, but that is all you get out of a tablet, so I felt like I was forced to upgrade something I didn’t really want to upgrade.

This was also my first experience of iOS 8 (until then everything was running iOS 6).

I do not think it is Apple’s finest release. Getting started on it was a pain. I was prompted for my iCloud password at start-up but it refused to accept it (even though I could log on to icloud.com with the same password repeatedly). Therefore I had to turn iCloud off at first and then re-enable it once I was up-and-running. Except it then prompted me for the password over and over again.

It then prompted me for the passwords to all my email accounts and worse, wouldn’t let me switch out to 1password to copy and paste it in. I had to open 1password on my phone and manually copy the passwords in, which is a massive pain when you use log and complicated ones.

After that the App Store kept insisting it had 11 updates even though I had updated everything, and most of the apps, including Apple’s own settings app rapidly crashed.

Apple are having a bad year. One bad release you could overlook, but Yosemite, the new version of OS X is preforming very poorly too. It took me 8 hours to complete the upgrade and since then I have found my Mac has crashed numerous times and there is a bug which causes file dialogues to continually grow so big they disappear off the screen that Apple does not seem to have any plans to fix.

The hardware on the iPad Air 2 is quite nice. It is a lot lighter than my old iPad 2 and I do really like the touch ID.

It’s difficult to discuss Apple v Android without everyone digging in their heels and becoming self-righteous. Of course we all really know that they have different advantages and disadvantages but it was interesting to see some slides from a recent talk by Benedict Evans talking about the growth of mobile.

When it comes to tablets, iPad make up around 25% of sales. But when it comes to internet traffic, iPad makes up 80%. That is incredible. What it shows is that even though people are buying Android tablets, they aren’t using them.

Based on those figures, you get this breakdown. For every 100 tablets bought:

• 25 are iPads that people use
• 6 are Androids that people use
• 69 are Androids that people do not use

You have to factor in that it doesn’t work exactly like this. iPad users could simply be heavier data users, but even if this is a consistent trend, it doesn’t really change what the above represents – people just don’t use Android tablets. They buy them, then they put them in a drawer and don’t use them. People do use iPads. To me, that suggests the extra cost of buying an iPad is worth the investment.

I’ve now installed iOS 6 on both my phone and my tablet. But, as of yet, I haven’t really noticed any difference.

I now have a clock on my iPad. Fine. Not used it. The maps look OK, but I was happy enough with Google Maps, so that isn’t really an upgrade because they have just replaced one thing with another, less accurate one.

The Siri improvements are very exciting, but then I haven’t used it yet. I use Siri for things like sending text messages and setting my alarms, which I can already do, and the Siri servers seem to be overloaded at the moment, as it’s practically too slow to use at the moment 🙁 .

Passbook, shared photo streams and Facebook integration I’m not really interested in, and I don’t like the cloud tabs or whatever they’re called. So, all in all, not really that impressed.

Many people used last week as a chance to lay into Apple, describing the iPhone 4S as a disappointing release.

I honestly can’t image why. It really is the iPhone 5 in everything but name, and perhaps a bit of exterior work, but from every other point of view, it’s a whole new phone.

They’ve put the dual-core A5 chip in it, which is the same chip that is inside my iPad 2, it has the dual antenna system, the battery life has been extended, and it’s new 8-megapixel camera not only has a new censor allowing it to capture 73% more light but it also shoots 1080p high definition video as well.

What I am most in love with however, is Siri. Their new voice control system not only allows you to do things just by speaking to your phone, but actually have a conversation with it!

Of course, speech recognition has been around for a long time and nobody really uses it, but this is what Apple do best – they take a niche technology and package it in a way which brings it to the mass market. For example, the first tablet came out decades ago, but it was only when Apple released the iPad did tablets really see the first mass adoption. Hopefully, Siri is the opportunity speech recognition has been waiting for.

As some of you know, despite being very much up on the whole computers thing that is going on these days, my diary remains very much on paper. I prefer it, I can easily add things and scribble things out, it comes in a very nice weekly view and is easy to flick through and I can carry it round easily.

However, with the latest addition to my family of gadgets, I am now carrying around a diary sized device with me anyway.

Having a paper diary also means that I have to transcribe all the events onto paper and there is no way to easily merge my personal diary and work diary. Also, repeating events are just so much easier when it comes to electronic diaries.

So, given the new opportunity, I’ve decided to give an electronic diary a go. Using Google Calendar, integrated into the Calendar app on my iPad, I now have my personal calendar and work calendar all nicely merged into one place and no longer need to carry around my paper diary.

I’m not entirely sold, I think it’s a little more difficult to add events than it is just scribbling them down, and I have some concerns regarding interoperability between Google and my iPad. I’m also not entirely sold on the weekly view I get from my calendar – I like the simplicity of just a list of events in my diary, rather than having a mix of all day events at the top and then actual events in the timeline, not all of which fits on screen.

But I’m going to give it a go and see if it improves my life. Can’t live in the stone age forever – not that they had paper in the stone age ;).

I’ve now had my iPad 2 for around two months. There are probably two words I would use to describe it – magical and revolution.

I would also agree that it sports an unbelievable price tag. It’s a lot of money, especially considering the other tablets which are coming out now. But these tablets are rubbish. It’s like comparing a £150 netbook to my £1,200 MacBook Pro and it’s the same situation – there are really two distinct classes of devices and because they have come out in reasonably similar time frames we find the iPad incredibly expensive. It is expensive, I will say that, but it’s such, such good value for money.

I really can’t think of a device which has changed the way I use technology in such a short period of time.

Comparable events I guess would be when I first began using computers, arguably you can never really top that. And when I first got my iPhone, that was a revolution as I was upgrading from my much loved, but a little featuring lacking k800i so for the first time had mobile internet access, allowing my to surf the web, use Google Maps, Twitter, Facebook and hundreds of other web services on the move.

But equally, the iPad 2 has simply changed the way I use technology. I don’t cart my laptop around any more, I don’t even bring it to work. It acts as a desktop mostly now, sitting on my desk hucked up to my wide screen monitor, and I use my iPad whenever I’m on the move.

I will switch from my laptop to my iPad to check Twitter because the experience is so much better. I no longer have to make a choice between browsing the web and reading emails or relaxing on the sofa, because it’s no longer a hassle to bring my internet device with me. I probably do more web browsing on my iPad than any other device now.

I don’t watch TV on anything other than my iPad now. Beyond the few times when I have it on in the background or we’re collectively watching a film, any time I’m watching TV by myself I will watch it on my iPad. Same for anything I stream off my media server.

It’s the first thing I look at in the morning when I’m checking what today’s weather forecast is and it’s the last thing I look at at night as I do a final check of my emails before getting some sleep. A job traditionally given over to my phone.

I buy most of my books on it via Kindle or iBooks, and do a lot of my reading on there as well. If I have a PDF to read, I’ll send it over to my iPad using Dropbox and read it on there, rather than reading it on my monitor, or printing it.

Finally, sometimes I just sit and gaze at its awesomeness. I mean, the thing is 8.8mm thick! That’s thinner than my iPhone 4, the world’s thinnest smartphone! It’s actually thinner than the tablets used in Star Trek – that means it’s thinner than the futurist Gene Roddenberry imagined tablets would be 300 years in the future. That’s really, really thin!

The point of that last paragraph is that it feels like a real advancement in technology, like the first time you browsed the internet or used a touchscreen.

The batter is a revolution too. It’s quoted as ten hours and you actually do get ten hours, and that is actual active using time – if you just leave it on standby, it will run for about a month.

The change here is that you no longer really need to think about it. Gone are the days when you would turn on a device and wonder if it had enough battery life to do what you wanted. With the iPad, you just turn it on and use it, and there is always enough battery life. You just charge it up, once or twice a week and it doesn’t matter if you leave the house with only 30% battery life because that is three hours of usage still!

In short, the iPad is amazing.

Since getting my iPad last month, and installing Kindle on it, I’ve gone back to reading some fiction. Not actually on the iPad, but it never the less seems to have inspired me.

Given the number of references I seemed to keep missing, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four seemed a good choice to start with and I found myself soon engrossed in the book. The plot, for those not familiar with it, looks at a dystopian totalitarian future in which The Party maintains total controls, not only over their subject’s actions, but also their thoughts.

It’s often used as the yardstick against which real-world regimes are measured, especially in today’s surveillance society which seems ever more encroaching and yet it definitely still a long distance away from the telescreens installed in every party member’s home, allowing the Thought Police to listen in to your home at any time, as presented in Orwell’s novel.

The book has quickly risen to one of my favourite novels of all time. For some reason, it seems to invoke a sense that despite malevolent efforts, true love can survive, even though in the novel itself, it actually doesn’t. Still, life would be boring if everything had a happy ending ;).

Having miserably failed to get an iPad 2 on launch date, I had back ordered one and quoted a time of 2-3 weeks. I was thus very pleased when I took a phone call the next Wednesday telling me that my iPad 2 was now really to collect.

First impressions have been great – it’s not the lightest device in the world but it is so amazingly thin (at 8.8mm, it’s .5mm thinner than my iPhone 4 – the world’s thinnest smartphone!) and the battery life is excellent. The screen doesn’t have smudge when you’re using it, but you can’t tell when it’s turned on so the display is excellent.

It’s fast – things that I have to weight to load on my iPhone 4 come up almost instantly and the graphics power for something so thin is bordering on witchcraft.

I’ve fallen in love with Garage Band. I can’t play any music instruments, despite trying to play the guitar on and off for five years (mostly off to be honest, I have no commitment to it, on purpose, but that’s a whole different story) so having the “smart guitar” which has the chords pre-defined into it is amazing.

Overall though, I see it more as a practical device than a toy. Being able to check my emails in bed, on a reasonable sized screen is fantastic and it means I can have access to a computer without having to lug my laptop to the pub.