Apple iPad review
Are we still as enamoured with the Apple iPad following our first look? We review Apple's latest device to find out.
The iPad is a great tool if you only need the capabilities of an iPhone with a large screen. Sure, email and the browser excel here, but to make it perfect for everything else, it needs much better security and you’ll have to purchase the extra dock and keyboard to make working on the move viable.
Although Apple hasn't yet solidly confirmed which of the iPhone 4.0 OS features will be transported to the iPad, we assume that it will be benefiting from at least some of them, such as the unified email inbox. This is likely music to business users' ears as it will mean that they can have more than one Exchange email account set up in a unified inbox. Currently, the iPad only supports one Exchange account, but multiple Gmail, Yahoo and POP3 email accounts, although they are all separate.
A unified inbox would make it much simpler to check email and fire off messages. We find swapping between multiple accounts somewhat laborious and not suited to those running both work and personal email accounts.
If you are to use the iPad as a business device, we strongly recommend downloading Pages, as it's the most desktop-like experience app we have found. It features a smooth, Apple-like UI and allows you to embed anything be it an image, table, or graph - into a document with as little effort as possible.
Documents can be exported as a Pages files for Mac, a Microsoft Word file, or a PDF document. You can also upload documents to the Apple iWork cloud storage service.
The keyboard across all applications is much easier to use than on the iPhone. Because of the extra space, you can even touch type in portrait mode. We achieved a typing speed of 50wpm on it our normal typing speed is 60wpm. Not at all a bad attempt, but it was a little difficult to keep the speed up after writing for 20 minutes. It's also a bit of a pain to type quickly when the iPad is laid flat on a surface.
Although the onscreen keyboard is super-easy to use, it isn't the most effective way to write documents or long emails, so we'd suggest spending more money on the iPad dock with keyboard. It's effectively a MacBook's keyboard, with a dock that ensures your iPad is upright, and makes typing much easier on the hands.
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