An American iPad in Britain

As my wife was on holiday in the States a couple of weeks ago, she very kindly offered to pick up an iPad for me while she was there. I had to do a talk on the subject and having the real thing would make a BIG difference.

After countless phone calls to Apple stores all over Chicago, she came back with the WIFI 32Gig version in white (we’ll skip the bit about the week+ holdup due to a volcano as I’m sure you’re all familiar with that). 

I’ll attempt in as few words as possible to give you the stuff you might not hear in other reviews.

The unit comes complete with American power supply (which is 100-240v and so works here), a box, a couple of pages of text and a lead. That’s about it. 

To run the iPad you need iTunes on your PC or Mac and at this time you can’t update from the iPad iStore as it gripes about you being outside of America but you can update via iTunes  on your PC.

On power-up the unit wants to talk to the free iTunes program and gives you the opportunity to restore from your iPhone backup or go for a new installation – I chose the latter and it installed most of the apps from my iPhone – yes, you get to use apps twice.

Of course the TomTom app isn’t going to do you much good without a GPS and the basic iPad has neither GPS nor Cellnet capability – it is wi-fi only. But that’s not necessarily a burden.

The unit had been charged in the US while waiting for the volcano to give up and so 20 minutes after the box was opened I had a working iPad and for the better part of the day I ran video, installed programs, moved things about and generally kept it busy, the screen was never off.

Ten hours later it wasn’t the iPad that gave up for the night, it was me. The unit was showing 20% power so the adverts are right – it will do a 10-hour day with no power. And it runs cool all the time – no noise, no heat! Beats my laptop hand-down in that area.

In a nutshell, the product is unique and does what Apple claims it does. It’s hard to position this as there isn’t anything to compare it with.

It’s not a replacement for a laptop as you only get to store the last few day’s email. From a business perspective, however, it does open up a real possibility of attending paperless meetings without having to give everyone a mains socket! The announcement that the operating system upgrade later this year will offer multiple Exchange accounts will be a god-send to some.

The lack of 3G connectivity isn’t that much of an issue if your mobile phone can act as a wi-fi access point (Joikuspot, wmwifirouter or similar) but you can’t use the tethering on an iPhone with the iPad – this seems such a silly omission. My solution was to take the SIM from a 3G dongle and use that with a Nokia e65 running Joikuspot – simple, it works - but not a solution for everyone.

The best application from a business perspective has to be Goodreader, which will interface to a variety of sources including FTP, WEBDAV, Google Docs and even Sharepoint to get your documents (there is also a dedicated Sharepoint app but I can’t get that to work). You can read PDFs, Word documents and a host of others internally to the package – absolutely ideal for meetings for which lugging a power supply around and hiding behind a laptop screen looks bad at the best of times.

The decision to let you use apps you’ve already purchased for your iPhone is great. iPad-specific apps are thin on the ground right now. The iPhone apps run in a small window or zoomed up to fit with appropriate jagged edges... and of course the app store won’t be supported in the UK until the iPad is released here in the UK.

But if you’re determined, it works, you can use it and to say the least, it is absolutely beautiful. I could give a lot more detail but the videos at the Apple website pretty much say it all, Simple, fast, elegant – it just works – but don’t throw that laptop away.

Peter Scargill