How useful is an iPad?

The NZ Herald iPad app.

Apple lent me an iPad for seven days, here are my impressions. Like most, I was immediately impressed with the form factor and build quality. This is no plasticky toy - it's solid, sleek and slick, yet also very thin. And the screen looks lovely.

After playing around with it for a couple of hours, I decided it was not an essential device. I don't need one. But the paradox here is that, although everyone in my family agreed with my assessment (that's a 17-year-old college student and another adult), the iPad was in constant use.

It hardly ever sat alone for longer than 30 minutes, and if I took it out of the lounge I could guarantee that within 15 minutes someone would come looking for it.

The iPad is hard to fit it into a specific category, but that may be the key to its success rather than a coda for failure. I would question the 'need' for an iPad as a gaming device, for example.

Apart from the fact that it's not specific gaming device, once you've paid $800 plus for something with a glass screen you can easily hold in two hands, there wouldn't be that many people who would want kids 'n' kidults throwing it around for hours on end.

Still, the games available are pretty good. I was entranced with the racing car game in which you hold the iPad as if it's a steering wheel. Tilt it back to brake, forward to accelerate ... it became disturbingly engrossing.

I highly recommend buying the iPad version of games. If you get the iPhone version, it either runs iPhone-sized or scaled up and bitmapped. Yuk.

But as a web surfer in the lounge, the iPad is simply lovely. Find a recipe, look something up, check something or just read news - the iPad offers unparalleled convenience and the screen is crisp and clear. On our WiFi network, load times for web media were impressive.

Is it a serious notebook replacement? No. But once again, it's strangely impressive all the same. The demo version had Apple's Pages and Numbers (word processor and spreadsheet) installed, and they're both wonderfully effective to use. I happily typed on the glass keyboard for up to 20 minutes - after that, I preferred the accessory Keyboard Dock.

This Apple product is lovely - easy to use, comfortable and effective. The iPad mounts to it vertically; if it's plugged into the power it will charge as you type.

Now, since this is Apple, you'd expect all these devices to be super expensive, but the prices surprised (even) me as being fair. The Keyboard Dock costs $119.

Apple also sent me the camera connection kit to try. This contains two little white units for $50 - one has an SD car slot in it, the other a USB connector. In turn they plug into the iPad's dock port.

Plug a camera into the USB one, and the pictures appear in the iPad's Photos app. You can do the same with an iPhone, by the way, to get it's pictures and movies across.

Same with an SD card - slide it into the connector and the photos appear one by one on the iPad.

But the USB connector rather begs the question: why can't I plug a USB hard drive or other device into it? Because, if you were going to use an iPad as your only computer, you'd want to get files onto it.

Apple warns against doing so.

But several sites, including Wired, point out that it will also let you hook up a USB keyboard, some USB audio devices and some regular card-readers.

Headsets work especially well with Skype for VoIP calls, according to TidBITS.

I'm not endorsing any of that. I didn't try them (the thought of having to replace Apple's 64GB 3G iPad put me off). But the possibilities are exciting and I hope Apple embraces some of them.

Another accessory Apple lent for testing was the black micro-fibre case. This really is an excellent example of an iPad case, for $69 - the way the cover folds back and lets you use it as a stand, in two different ways, is really effective and useful, and it seemed very nicely made.

How about apps, though? Like I said, if you have an iPad, it will be well used. One reason for using it a lot is the excellent (dare I say it here?) NZ Herald app. It's iPad only.

The New Zealand Herald app decants a selection of news stories daily (when you launch it) into your iPad over wireless and/or 3G.

This was developed in-house at the NZ Herald by Max Flanigan, amongst others. The pictures look great in full colour, the free app can potentially embed animations, it's clear, readable and easy to use and it had me reading more mainstream news than I've read in quite a while.

My only beef with it is that Mac Planet isn't in the selection! Whaaaa....

Another excellent example of a NZ iPad free app comes from North & South magazine. It's basically a subscription host - get the app free, and it's the shell into which you download the latest magazine for NZ$6.49 a pop - as editor Virginia Larsen pointed out, this is an incredibly effective way of serving overseas' subscribers compared to physically managing and sending printed copies long distances. The ACP Media techs did a lovely job on this, and learnt a lot from the process - the results will no doubt show up across other titles. There's also an iPhone version.

A very serious new iPad (and iPhone) app is FileMaker Go, which appeared, somewhat oddly, in the NZ App Store in iTunes a day before the rest of the world. As FileMaker engineer (and speaker at CreativeTech) David Head told me, "Develop in Pro, modify in Go."

FileMaker Go gives end users full access to databases while away from their computers. It effectively makes FileMaker extensible into the iDevice realm - it's not a development platform, but a viewer that lets you modify some of the data. As a FileMaker client it supports all the high end features of the latest Pro, including web view, which means GoogleMaps can open directly inside it. This is due to Apple WebKit support (FileMaker is a fully-owned subsidiary of Apple.)

The platform has been modified to support touch and tap, screen rotation and is scaled slightly differently for iPhone and iPad screens; the keyboard appears as soon as you touch an entry field.

Layouts available reflect whether it's installed on iPhone iOS4 (only) or iPad in OS 3.2.

There are Previous and Next buttons for field navigation on the iPad's on-screen keyboard and FileMaker's QuickFind feature is supported within Go, as is Sort.

Modifications out on the road on iPad/iPhone also take place in the database, as long as those features aren't locked at source for the individual devices/users.

David Head expects some of the handy Sort and other interface features to be requested in for future desktop versions of FileMaker Pro.

As a relational database it also supports portals and FM Pro scripts. It even has SQL database support. You can download an entire FM database onto an iPad; recent hosts and available hosted databases show up in a list.

You just add and sync databases through iTunes, just as you handle other sync events.

If you download any .fm7 file from a website with your iDevice (.fm7 being the file type supported from FileMaker 7 up to the latest FileMaker Pro 11) Go will open it if Go is installed.

It's a live database with standard FM security. Add a record in Go and it appears in the hosted database, for those out on the road handling stock and inventory.

If you press the Home button and exit out of FDM Go, Go will try and open you back up to where you were during the last session. If you were were working on a hosted database somewhere else, Go will still try and get you back to where you were. It goes into a kind of 'hibernation' mode.

Performance seems more dependent on how simple the database's interface is than the size and complexity of the database. In use, a 350,000 entry database in Santa Clara is accessed easily and handily from Australia over 3G.

FileMaker Pacific's David Head thinks this might prompt some developers to work on interface simplification.

All in all, for a device I considered I had no use for, I sure found a lot of use for an iPad.

- Mark Webster mac-nz.com