(no subject)

[seekingferret]

Yesterday I acquired Ajax_lesser, my new iPad. I am super pleased that I own two computers named Ajax. I also renamed my iPod Tecmessa after Ajax Telamon's concubine from Sophocles' play Ajax, because see: bad person.

I've started playing with the iPad to see what I can do with it. Amazon Instant Video and Marvel Unlimited apps are superior to the Touchpad web apps, and in general the screen is gorgeous. Stanza is at least comparable to pReader. I miss cards, though. Apple multitasking is wonky and annoying. It especially bothers me that if I switch out of an Amazon video because I got an email alert, it loses my place in the Amazon app. The WebOS card interface was such a great design. At least Safari does tabs. I also think I liked the Touchpad email program better, but I bet there are third party email programs out there I'll like.

And I'm looking forward to dipping into the universe of iPad apps. The app catalog from HP was so sparse that it limited my imagination of what you can do with a tablet. Anybody have recommendations of things they've found cool and/or useful?

Comments

[zandperl]

I missed, what made you go for the iPad? Last I knew you were emphatically against.

Some things I've found fun and/or useful:
* WolframAlpha - $1-$2?, I have this on my iPhone, I don't know if there's a separate iPad version. It's a couple bucks I think, and well worth it if you do math. It's somewhere between a graphing calculator and MatLab. Edit: since this is a paid program, it has all the functionality which WolframAlpha.com says you can only get if you subscribe there, so sometimes I start a problem on the website and find the website cannot do what I need so move over to my phone.
* PCalc Lite - free, for when you don't need everything WolframAlpha does
* Exoplanets - fun, free, tells recently discovered ones. :)
* Pandora - yayfor music
* (Amazon) PriceCheck - free, lets you see their prices for items you find in the store.
* QR Scanner - free, self-evident.
* Dropbox - free, lets you access your Dropbox files
* GoodReader Lite - free, my favorite PDF reader/annotator
* KnittingHelp - at something like $5-$10, this is my most expensive app, but I wanted to support them
* BofA - free Bank of America app. Easiest way for me to deposit checks.
* Audible - free, self-evident.

And that's not even getting to the games (I've played and given up many many of them, but never paid for any).

Edit: To be clear, I'm currently staring at my iPhone, so these are all iPhone versions. All iPhone apps can run on iPads (either the same size so only filling like 1/9 of the screen, or scaled to fit the screen so low-res), but sometimes there are separate iPad versions which look better on the iPad.

[seekingferret]

I don't think I was emphatically against, before. I think that was you reading too much into what I said. Before, I was skeptical about the value of the iPad. I conceded its interface was superior to the other devices I was considering, but wasn't sure that was enough to justify the price. Two things changed that equation:

First, I actually played with the Kindle Fire. It became clear to me that I would not have been happy with the base model, that to hit the niche i wanted I would have needed the HD. So from that side the price gap was narrowed. And though I think I would have been fine with the Kindle Fire HD, I was not impressed with the interface overall- it's geared much more to content delivery rather than to general purpose computing, and I want the tablet to do a little of both.

On the other side, I found that refurbished models got generally good reviews on quality and were significantly cheaper. This again narrowed the price gap between the Kindle Fire and iPad.

Thanks for the app recommendations.