Howard Oakley
There’s a whole raft of great apps for the iPad, but the lack of wifi hotspots means you often find you can’t access them.
For my son, the most exciting item in the Apple parcel was an AppleCare Technician Training package. He’s completing his Cisco training, but rather than my corrupting his youth with soccer or snooker, I got him hooked on Macs – and iPhones, iPads and expensive techno-fixes. I had expectations of a stack of DVDs with hardware diagnostics, tear-down manuals, and more nectar for the nerd in me. I was surprised by a tiny AppleCare box containing a sheet of paper bearing his training ID and links to online training.
With this came the latest of my iPad accessories: a spare power adaptor and a VGA adaptor so I can teach from my iPad. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with my MacBook, but there will be a certain frisson when I flourish the diminutive iPad and proceed to expound for a couple of hours to its Keynote accompaniment.
My iPad is already changing my life. Once an avid skimmer of broadsheet papers, I abandoned them two decades ago. The time has long gone when I had to sprawl them out and scan for enticing articles. Despite new flavours offered by The Independent, my interest flagged, and I stopped buying.
My iPad already takes four periodicals, including MacUser, of course, and The Times. I resisted the temptation of subscribing to hair styling magazines, despite their luxurious photography, and my second favourite printed magazine, an obscure French title featuring the finest watercolour paintings, may take a while to arrive in this format.
The Times has been vindication of my claim that the iPad doesn’t await a ‘killer app’, but is all about content. There are few people in Europe who are less interested in football than I, but gorgeous colour photos and apposite stories forged by professionals have lured me to read about the game, when not savouring coverage of the Tour de France.
Inevitably, I still await an illustrated eBook on art history, but for its sheer volume of wonderful paintings, Art Authority is hard to beat. Add a couple of drawing and painting apps, X-Plane, superb iPhone utilities such as National Rail, and my iPad is a wonderful travelling companion, outclassing laptops many times its volume.
Still, my biggest problem is connectivity. As my daily commute takes me through fractured 3G coverage, and after nearly burning my fingers over data roaming, there was little to be gained from the 3G version. This leaves me in the frequently futile quest for wifi hotspots. Despite hinting to landlords of our favoured feeding places, the only hotspots here seem to be in establishments where I don’t wish to spend time. So whether we’re walking on the downs, painting en plein air or in transit, my iPad is isolated, depriving me of the glories of LightTrac, which shows sun directions on Google maps, for instance.
Connectivity would be so much simpler if there was a programme to deploy wifi Internet access across Europe. This would be much cheaper than the prodigious investment required to bring wired/cable broadband to everyone, whether in rural areas where wifi is well proven, or in cities, where it can connect whole blocks for peanuts. Now that most of us enjoy phones that move with us rather than being tied to a landline, why waste vast sums on fixed broadband coverage?
The future is bright, if it’s wireless.
