Sunday, May 02, 2010

Notes from (and about) the iPad 3G

I received the iPad 3G late on Friday and have not spent tons of time putting it through its paces. However, knowing I was going away for the weekend motivated me to get it set-up right away to take with me as my device of choice. I had been reading and rereading the online manual since the WiFi version was released and had bookmarked all the good advice from the blogs on how best to set it up, so I was prepared. Here are my thoughts thus far:

It is lightning fast! It moves between apps so fast, I hardly miss multi-tasking. There are times when it would come in handy, but I managed to make liberal use of cut-and-paste to make things work between apps when necessary.

Set-up was easy. I followed the advice online and manually moved media and apps to the iPad to allow me to pick the apps that would work best on it. I had a lot of photo apps on the iPhone that were not necessary to install on the iPad.

I cannot recommend the 3G version highly enough! I have used it to grade papers in Moodle while waiting in the car and in this hotel room where wireless access is spotty at best. The purchase of the 3G service through iTunes was easy, too.

I moved photos of the honors graduation ceremony up to the iPad using the camera connection kit SD card component and it went easily and I was able to both share the photos on the iPad itself and email them to others.

It is truly a "different" type of device and it takes a bit to get a feel for it. At first it seemed a bit awkward when I was treating it like a big iPhone. However, once I got past that, I realized it truly is in a class of technology by itself!