<\/p>\n

After spending the past six months talking myself out of an iPad, I finally talked myself into one.<\/p>\n

I’ve been following the tablet scene since Apple first released the iPad, and it has become apparent to me that, at least for the time being, no one is going to step up and directly challenge Apple. And I had really hoped that somebody was going to.<\/p>\n

The iPad has a 9.7″ screen. I’d prefer a larger one (8.5×11″ would be perfect), but it appears that manufacturers are instead moving toward a smaller 7″ standard. The Samsung Galaxy, Dell Streak, and RIM PlayBook (?) all sport 7″ screens, and if you believe the latest rumors out of China, next year’s iPad 2 will come in a 7″ size as well (no word yet as to if the larger 9.7″ size will be discontinued or not). The iPad 2 will probably sport at least one camera (front facing, I’m guessing), but between my iPhone’s camera and my Pentax K-x, I just can’t imagine needing a third at my disposal. <\/p>\n

Playing non-Apple-approved video formats has always been a pain in the butt on Apple products — and no, I’m not willing to re-encode hundreds or thousands of DivX files to mp4. A week or two ago, VLC (the video player most known for “playing pretty much anything”) was ported to the iPad, and it plays native DivX files wonderfully. It’s still version 1.0 and it has some issues, but it works and I’m happy. <\/p>\n

I don’t like how Android updates are tied to specific hardware makes and models. I have a few early-adopting friends with Android phones who can’t upgrade and run modern programs. And after seeing the video of Samsung Galaxy running Windows 7 (which went so poorly that I believe Microsoft has had the video pulled from YouTube), I’m convinced that Windows 7 as it stands today is not the tablet OS of the future. With a front end? Maybe. It’s just not natively a touch-friendly OS. <\/p>\n

I actually pre-bought my Kindle back before they were released. It was a good e-reader, but I thought some of the unit’s other features were lacking. I also got tired of converting PDF files over one at a time to read them on my Kindle. (Amazon eventually added the ability to natively display PDF files on the Kindle … but the print was so small, I couldn’t read them.) I also bought an Acer netbook, which was a better computer than the Kindle, but a worse e-reader. As it stands, I think the iPad will replace them both. I’ve already sold the Kindle, and the Acer is on the chopping block.<\/p>\n

As with any gadget, time will tell whether or not the iPad fully integrates itself into my life, or if it becomes “one of those things I bought that one time that sounded neat.” I’ve already started filling iBooks with PDF files and the kids are enjoying some of the free games I installed, so I’m hoping to get quite a bit of use out of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After spending the past six months talking myself out of an iPad, I finally talked myself into one. I’ve been following the tablet scene since Apple first released the iPad, and it has become apparent to me that, at least for the time being, no one is going to step up and directly challenge Apple. And I had really hoped that somebody was going to. The iPad has a 9.7″ screen. I’d prefer a larger one (8.5×11″ would be perfect), but it appears that manufacturers are instead moving toward a smaller 7″ standard. The Samsung Galaxy, Dell Streak, and RIM… (read more)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2515"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2515\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}