My new iPad2

I have been an iPhone user for last two years. I love my iPhone4 and the ease with which you can buy Apps, Movie & Music in iTunes (though I hate the Photos management in iTunes). For many months now except for presentations I don’t use my laptop much – when in office it is Office Desktop and at the house, it is Home PC and in between I do my emails with iPhone. Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync keeps my email synced between the Office PC, Home PC, Laptop & iPhone. Windows Live Mesh syncs the files between the PCs & Laptop effortlessly. Whenever I am reading a book or a magazine I keep my iPhone next to me to refer in Wikipedia or browse the web about the topic I am reading. Even while watching TV having iPhone and turning to it for some information has become a habit – whether it is to find a song in YouTube I just remembered or to IMDB to refer on how old is an actor or buy a book from Amazon/Flipkart that you just read about in the Newspaper today.  As you can imagine I am a heavy user of my iPhone, I have an Amazon KindleDX as well, so I was sceptical whether I need an iPad2. My friend who has been having an iPad for last one year kept telling it is a lifestyle device and I couldn’t see how.

Now after having been using an iPad2 for last few days, I can understand why the world loves this device. I bought an iPad2 64GB Wi-Fi model through my US office in Washington. Apart from the device, I bought a VGA Cable, the SmartCover (Light Blue), Apple CarePack giving one-year additional warranty and adding WA State Tax it came to $927. The form factor, weight, display & audio are ideal for consuming content, it is not much of a Productivity Tool or Content Creation tool. There is a vast difference between what I read & visualized about the device, it feels a whole lot better to actually have the device in your hand and use it. Playing Videos on YouTube, Photo viewing, Web browsing, reading FaceBook/Twitter/Blogs with Flipboard is addictive.

Following are the 3rd Party Apps I am currently using in iPad, most of them are the same I use in iPhone4, but few of them only work in iPad.

• Social: Twitter, Skype, Flipboard (this one app is worth the iPad price)
• Books: Google Books, Kindle
• News & Magazines: BBC News, MaalaiMalar, Bloomberg BusinessWeek (I am a paid subscriber)
• Reference: LIFCO Tamil Dictionary (from my firm LIFCO Publishers), Dictionary,  Google, Delicious Bookmarks, IMDb, Wolfram Alpha
• Photo & Video: VLC Player (to play WMV and other formats), iMovie (paid app works in both iPhone4 & iPad), WiFi Photo Transfer (to share photos without a cable)
• Utilities: MyKeePass (I can’t live without this one), iRDesktop (to remote desktop to Windows), Sellinam (to type in Tamil), Microsoft OneNote (works but is an iPhone app)
• Games (mostly for my son): Solitaire, JellyCar3, Angry Birds HD, Zoo Story, Farm Story, City Story, Bakery Story, Missing Letters (from my firm Vishwak)
• Travel: TripIt, TripAdvisor