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iPad Thoughts

Written on: April 14th, 2010 in Blog Posts

I was very fortunate to be able to spend a lot of my vacation last week “road-testing” a new iPad, and I’m happy to report my findings! First, let’s say that while the iPad is very cool indeed, there are some significant limitations overall- as an e-reader device, however, I don’t think that there’s an equal.

The iPad works pretty much out of the box, and once it was unpacked, I got down to the business of downloading a number of library-oriented applications. The iReader native Apple e-bookstore and reader app is very nice, although I think that the virtual bookshelf imagery is a bit hackneyed at this point. However there were all of the titles one could hope for- a little pricier I think that Amazon. The user-interface for the reader is very nice indeed, and extremely intuitive. The reader ‘swipes’ the page to turn it back and forward, and there are tools at the top of the screen for font size, bookmarking etc. The large size of the iPad screen makes this the closest thing to reading a real book- the appearance and ‘feel’ is very book-like: when you factor in the fact that this is only one of the many things that the iPad does (albeit one at a time- more later), you have to think that Jeff Bezos over at Amazon.com is chewing his fingernails down to the bone.
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