Every Wednesday morning I go to Starbucks (Americano grande, steamed milk, in, please) to meet my three, retired like me, friends from Sunderland City Library. Quite often we'd see people at other tables with, at first (we've been doing this for five years now), their laptops but more recently their cool Ipads. "I'm going to get one of those," I'd say from time to time, "so I could come in here and sit and look cool." But I was only joking, being quite happy with my desktopfor all my computing needs. But desktops get old and things stop working or working as well as they should and so, when mine frequently started only letting me access some websites in HTML and limiting what I could do on them, I got irritated and one evening a couple of weeks ago I ordered an Ipad 2 16GB from Amazon. In the morning, after reading a bit more about it, I cancelled that order and replaced it with the latest model the Ipad 4 Retina 32GB Wifi Black as it only cost about hundred quid more.
Shiny!
Then I had to learn how to use it which proved harder than I expected, partly because I didn't realise my ITunes ID was the same as my email address and I spent hours going round in circles unnecessarily changing my password numerous times. One thing I hadn't really thought about was that this is an Apple machine and I've been working on Windows for nearly 20 years which involved and involves quite a bit readjustment on my part.
I then had to get to grip with apps which again involved entering my email address and password as the Ipad seemed incapable of remembering it. Even then, when I'd downloaded an app for a site I was familiar with (like BBC News Online) it didn't work the way I was familiar with.
Luckily the day after it arrived a couple came to pick up a kitten which they'd gotten from me but then went on holiday for a couple of weeks while I looked after it again. Colin has had Ipad for a while and although they couldn't say very long he did give me some useful tips so that I could at least use the camera and even do video on it and the results were very good (in terms of technical quality, as evidence of my own photographic skills -meh).
I downloaded Amazon's Kindle app which in turn downloaded from the Cloud a few books I'd bought over a year ago. Today I bought a couple of books about horror movies which were much cheaper as Kindle editions than print. The size of the Ipad screen (9.7inches) makes reading ebooks better than on the much smaller Kindle reader itself. I haven't figured out how to bookmark pages yet but I'm sure I shall.
I do quite like sitting on my settee watching trailers and other videos and stuff to being upright on a computer chair but there is no substitute when you need to type more than password for a decent keyboard.
It's early days but I've moved on from frustration and irritation to falling in like with it. If I learn how to do anything interesting with it other than take videos of kittens I'll let you know.
No comments:
Post a Comment