iPad

I spent 2 hours today playing with my friend's new iPad.  According to the delivery guy, the warehouse had dozens of pallets of them in the warehouse, ready to deliver.  And we live in B.F.E.....

So, it turns on and works.  The web browser is great.  email looks cool (Google has a special email client for it that's supposed to be incredible).  But he only had 1 or 2 books on his bookshelf when I got there.

When we started, we had to use iTunes to copy files to the iPad using the usb cable.  I thought it could sync over wifi, but we didn't get that far.
I copied over a .azw file, a .mobi file, a .html file and one pdf.
The .html file opened up in Safari, just like you'd expect.  The .azw and .mobi formats would do nothing.  Trying to open the pdf file was very difficult.


Using Calibre, we were able to "reconvert" the source file into an .epub file, which worked just fine on the iPad's bookshelf application.

We got the pdf to open up by pointing Safari at a web site's pdf file.  It opened up just great.  We installed an iPhone application to read pdfs, and it worked.... but!  because it's ported over, and written for a smaller screen the text wasn't great.  Turning the ipad and zooming in/out made it look good enough.

It's hard to figure out where to copy files to the ipad to open with "pages" and "numbers", or import documents.  Not saying that it won't work, but it was harder than I'd have liked to do this.

We put about 7 different books on the iPad, created with Calibre.  By using the "tag" setting in Metadata, I could group them into "genre" categories.  But there is no way to shrink a category to a small icon on the bookshelf.  So I'd still end up with 160 entries on my bookshelf.  It'd be possible to organize them, but not quite what I'd like.  It's possible to copy and paste notes into "pages" and type a note, but it won't do notes inside the book like the Kindle does.  (points to Kindle for this)

Turning the kindle on it's side, and propping it up on things, I got a nice angle and could touch type on the screen with high accuracy at about 25wpm, I wasn't trying to type fast.

First impression:  It's cool, and I'd like one.  BUT it's not quite there yet.  I bet software updates in the next month make it much better.

Adobe needs to release a free acrobat reader that is written to use the full features of the iPad.