Well, actually it's not a new toy so much as a work tool. The Ipad. The much trumpeted about beautifully designed light as air little computer you can put in your handbag. I have been given it by my lovely husband as an early birthday present. Why early? Because I am shortly off to a writers' retreat where we just sit and write each day and I have a ton of projects I am working on. I need a light word processor with a good battery and so, we bought the Ipad. So, how's it performing? It looks and feels wonderful and is great for searching the web. On the word processing front however, there are a couple of glitches. Firstly, you have to download a word processing programme and pay exra for it - yes folks, everything costs extra with the Ipad. Secondly, the programme Iwork Pages has certain fundamental flaws for a writer. The first one is that there is no word count facility. Why not Steve Jobs? Why on earth when you invented this lovely thing did you leave out that very simple, absolutely essential for the writer tool? So I beetled off and investigated the web to see how to get around this. There is after all a way around everything. Yup, you guessed, you have to download yet another app which has a word count facility. I duly paid my pennies and downloaded. But, can I work out how on earth to use it? No, and what's more doing so has taken up writing time. So, back to the drawing board..... It is however a wonderful piece of equipment, slim, light as a feather and the battery life is great. Also, it has a natty keyboard/dock which has been pared down to the bone in inches but where the keyboard bit is actually full size and incredibly easy to use. So, marks out of ten? Eight so far but nice, very, very nice.
5 comments:
This sounds too complicated for me, and I guess expensive. I want one of those little "Apple" computers that my grandkids have, they are so light, different from my own rather heavy laptop.
Hope you have a great time at the writer's retreat.
Thanks Margaret. All this stuff is so hideously complicated isn't it. It's true, the Ipad wasn't cheap, but we needed another laptop - it seemed like a good alternative and it is blissfully light. I've lugged our old one to Turkey and Spain on hols and boy does it weigh heavy!!
I am sooo jealous. I want an iPad. You should try Kate Hardy's blog she recently got an ipad and will be able to tell you how to get the word count thing to work.
I love mu iPad :o) Sorry, Cara, can't do the wordcount thingy for you (Susan, you're so sweet to think I could!!) but I get round it by emailing it to myself and opening it in Word. (I do however know how to do coloured text... so email me if that would help. No track changes and not even a highlighter - which is a pain, as that's how I do my revisions - but as Pages is only £5.99 (compared to about £90 for Office), I can live with it :o)
Pocket informant is a really good diary/todo system (almost as good as Lotus Organizer).
And then you have limbering-up stuff (cough) such as Boggle and Scrabble...
Enjoy the Ipad and happy early birthday (and what a lovely, lovely DH you have)
Very interested to read about your experiences with this beautiful looking bit of kit. I work away from home on an Alphie (Alphasmart) which is very basic, no internet connection at all, but works well for me. Not saying Iwouldn't be very happy to have an IPad though!
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