Alright! So I sprung for the iPad Air, since my iPad 2 was getting a little long in the tooth. (Apparently it is ‘Apple upgrade week for me’, since my iPhone 5s is waiting at the office for me to get picked up. I will do that on Monday).
Setting up the new iPad took a little bit of time, since I had to fix my music library on the PC that I synch to. (It’s a long story; some of the music files did not get transferred over to my new PC that I upgraded to earlier this year, and I had to manually import the 50 or so music files into the iTunes library one CD at a time. Only my iTunes music purchases were on the Apple cloud, and that’s still only about 5% of my music collection).
So what do I use my iPad for – now that I have had one for two years? Check out my punch list below. The iPad has its place, but I have an iPhone, and my 15 inch notebook computer from work, almost always with me to use as well. (Whatever happened to the idea that we will all have one and only one device for everything? My answer : Evolution and reality. A big screen is needed for maps and for reading, and a proper keyboard is needed for typing).
What I use my iPad for
> Read digital subscriptions for TIME magazine, Bloomberg Business Week and New York Times (more and more; I still get paper copies in the mailbox but I am about to cancel the paper copies completely)
> Read Twitter’s news feed (as opposed to e-mail, which I read mostly on my phone, and respond to mostly with my notebook computer)
> Do not read books on the iPad (prefer my books in paper mode!)
> Do not take pictures with the iPad (use my phone or full-fledged digital camera)
> Play Scrabble and SpellTower (and really nothing else at this point, so no Angry Birds or Candy Crush)
> Listen to music (on the airplane; as opposed to listening to music on my phone)
> Look at pictures in my synched photo albums (occasionally)
> Watch YouTube videos
> Do not watch movies on it yet (movies bought from the iTunes store, that is .. at home my whole movie collection is on DVD and Blu-ray. I have stopped buying movies on those formats since the whole disk format way of dealing with movies is rapidly changing to on-line streaming and downloading content – similar to what has been under way with music for many years now)
> Surf the web with Google Chrome
> Use various other really cool little apps, among my favorites is Google Translate (and I’m trying to figure out how to best use EverNote for reminders and notes)
