I bought a shiny

[carbonel]

Tonight I went to the Apple Store at the Mall of America and bought one of the last two iPads they had in stock, a 32-gig 3G device. I'd intended to buy a 16-gig one, but they were out of stock on that, and I'll probably be happy to have the extra disk space.

Right now, it's synching to a selection of music from iTunes (on my desktop computer), and that will use up more than half the space right there.

It's accessing the house wireless just fine, which relieves me.

The only accessory I bought was a docking station. I can see that it's going to be a nuisance that it only works with the iPad in the portrait position. I need to figure out some way to get a comparable angle with it in the landscape position. I would have bought a case, but they were sold out of those. I'll probably end up with a keyboard eventually, but I want to see how well I manage without an extra thing to shlep first.

Tomorrow I'll worry about getting e-mail working with it.

I do hope I actually like the thing; I had been thinking that at worst, it would be a $72 mistake because that's the restocking charge if it's returned, but it needs to be returned in 14 days, and in 14 days from now I'll still be on an airplane returning from my Alaska cruise. If I'd counted things out better, I would have waited until tomorrow (well, it is tomorrow now, but it wasn't earlier) to purchase it. On the other hand, it have been sold from under me if I'd waited.

Comments

[msmoat.livejournal.com]

Cool! I ordered one online, but it won't arrive until June 22. There are a lot of different cases out there, and a variety of different stands for better hands-free and angle-viewing. I'm definitely buying a keyboard--this is going to take the place of my laptop for traveling. Have fun1 There are a lot of really nifty apps!

[carbonel]

I'm hoping to be able to manage without a keyboard because that makes it much more portable. But I'm not a writer, and I don't expect to do much editing on the device.

I'll definitely be interested in recommendations for apps.

And I (so far) enthusiastically recommend Dropbox. It's an amazingly easy way to get files from the desktop computer to the iPad (and other devices, of which I have none that are relevant). You create a folder, and Dropbox attempts to keep anything you stick into it consistent over all the devices. It got a PDF over for me (and I could read it) after I'd been worrying about having to transfer it via the Kindle app, which doesn't deal all that well with PDFs.

[msmoat.livejournal.com]

Oh, cool about Dropbox. I do, in fact, have Dropbox on all my computers--I use it in conjunction with my password protection program so my computers and iPhone are all synced with my pssswords. I also use it for my Scrivener files so I can work on stories anywhere. I did not know that iPad works with Dropbox, though, so yay!

EOS has a list of iPad apps already prepared for me. *g* We'll share.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Fourteen days? But...I won't get to see you! D:

[carbonel]

I'll be there Saturday and Sunday, if all goes well. It's a Friday-to-Friday cruise.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

:-D

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

You bought an Apple product?

K.

[carbonel]

Yep. I think it'll work okay as a travel laptop equivalent, and I suspect I'll get a lot more use out of it in town than I would a conventional laptop.

I don't have any inherent bias against Apple products -- I love my iPod and have been faunching after an iPhone, after all. It's just that I think I need to stay with Windows (and Word) for most real-world work stuff.

[ckd]

I'm loving mine. (In fact, I am currently planning to not bring my laptop to Fourth Street on the grounds that the iPad will do most of what the laptop will, but is a whole lot lighter and easier to haul around.)