It’s addictive, using it. One of the first things I realized this morning was that I’ll have to put the iPad up for awhile to let it recharge, after 12 hours of use. Those four Dexter episodes Abby and I streamed in a row over Netflix last night never would’ve been possible on the Macbook’s battery life, and the Sony Netflix streaming DVD player is just a bafflement to set up. I think the reviewer at BoingBoing got it right when she said that this thing, like the “Pre or the iPhone before it, scratches an itch we didn’t know we had.”
The OLPC -- how 2007!
But I knew I needed a better reach to scrape up creations, on the move. Two years ago I bought a One Laptop Per Child mobile PC, hoping to have something light and slim and agile enough to take anyplace to do my writing and research via the Web. When the computer showed up at the door — a twin of it had been donated to the the OLPC charity — the mini-laptop was a bust. Yes, it was brute simple and built to be rugged as a tank. Yes, it could touch the Internet and came packed with software. The computer was really the first netbook, but the comparison goes right to the woes that the netbooks will fight. Its keyboard was a plastic sheathed toy, its screen a shuddering reminder of the 1980s portables’ ghostly gray, the software cobbled from open source and freeware that made it easy to understand how it had arrived at its price. The battery was in regular need of charging, especially after any Web use.
This mini computer suffered from the same curse the tech wizards claimed for the iPad’s fate: it did many things, none of them very well. It was a snazzy green and white concept car of a computer with lots of good ideas assembled by committee. It never made it out of my office, so immobile its charms proved to be. Recently the OLPC group asked us all if we’d donate our minis back to the foundation. They might have heard nobody was getting much use from them.
These are the battles that a mobile computer must win. Its interface must be seamless, intuitive, flexible. Its display must be attractive, enticing you to stay in its playground. It must be responsive in its speed and generous in its possibility to entertain and present. It must stay alive a single charge long enough to use it all day — and have enough left for it to be waiting for you to pop in that last sentence that came to you in the middle of the night. It must connect you to those you know and everything you don’t over the Web. And it has to be mobile enough to carry around as if it were a coffee mug: not something you would ever think of jamming into a pocket, but a thing you don’t even consider when you move from room to room, office to office, sandbox to chalkboard and back.
There are surprises among our iPad’s first day, but nothing to keep it from coming out to play, or work. I haven’t found Flash missing because I didn’t rely on it for anything but games. And this entry? Typed on the built-in keyboard of the iPad. I left the click-sound-effects on, to help me get used to the rhythm. (But that’s not a sound you want your wife to wake to, sleeping next to you while the words come upon you in the dark. You can shut it off.)
It’s addictive, intuitive and inventive, this slender device. It’s a tool that has made the leap from toy, turning mobile into a real option for creating as well as consuming. Pages for the iPad makes it possible to get a good start on my writing, then share it forward to the Web or my Mac.
Pages has got a more grown-up cousin on the Mac, an alternative to Word that made lots of people wonder why Apple bothered to create such a thing. The iPad actually gives Pages a better reason to be. You will be holding your breath for Microsoft to introduce Word running on an Apple mobile device, to be certain. With Pages ($9.95, App Store) you have a good enough word processor to draft memos and letters, or dress things up with graphics and built-in charting. You can forget about remembering to save, too, because Pages does that for you every 30 seconds.
What you don’t want to forget is to leave Pages on your iPad. Apple warns that if you delete the app, it takes away all your documents, too. Apple’s iWeb does something similar on the Mac, cramming all your creations into a big file that includes the application. It’s far from elegant, but only if you do a lot of manual document management. Exporting is easy enough, either to the Web using the in-beta iWork.com, or out to your Mac by way of the apps tab in iTunes 9.1. It’s great to write things on this little gem, but they need to go other places, too.
Pages has enough formatting and find and replace to get your it’s replaced by its, or to seek out whole words instead of part of them. It’s got a built-in spell checker and plenty of the usual document fundamentals. But where you see Pages sparkle is when you touch them, to adjust a graphic element by just dragging it with your finger to place it or resize it. It’s easy to see what kind of challenge Microsoft is going to have before it in creating a Word that can do this with the army of iPad-Killers that are sure to emerge. Apple has control of the program, the operating environment, and the hardware. Apple loves control, and with all the elements of making and sharing a page of writing at hand, our iPad is going to be creating a lot of first drafts.
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