All About The iPad

Second attempt!

I wrote a couple of paras on the morning after installing 4.2 with my initial thoughts, only to have it lost by the Tumblr web interface. I’m now trying again, this time using Blogpress on the iPad.

So initial thoughts….

I won’t go over all the new features of iOS 4.2 but just some observations of some of the major points.

Multitasking - Probably the most significant upgrade and it works just like on the iPhone. The surprising thing is how little I’ve used it. May take a bit of retraining as I’ve become used to single tasking on the iPad. It did come into it’s own when I needed to look up a password in 1password though. NIce to have Spotify now able to continue playing in the background although, we really need a native iPad app.

Most apps seem to play just fine with 4.2 although I have seen some issues with Twitter for iPad. The rule of thumb is that if the app is universal app for both iPad and iPhone, it should behave well under 4.2 as it’s already been optimised for multitasking on the iPhone. If it’s a native iPad app, chances are it will need a tweak to work properly.

Folders - I started to re-organise my apps into folders but gave up half way through. Think I’ll wait for the final version of 4.2. You can get a lot more icons in a folder on the iPad. Not sure how useful it will be as without the Retina display of the iPhone, it’s quite hard to recognise the icons. An equivalent of the retina display for the iPad must be on the cards for next year.

AirPlay - The most exciting development for me, even though I can’t test it yet. The AirPlay icon appears next to most HTML5 video controls so it looks like we won’t be limited to just iTunes. At the moment, the only devices appearing in the list to AirPlay to are the IPad and the Airport Express, my existing Apple TV doesn’t appear. It’s debatable if Apple will release an update to the old Apple TV to allow it but I doubt it.

AirPrinting - Again, unable to test as I haven’t got a supported wifi printer and I don’t want to upgrade the Mac with my printer to the next OSX beta. The print option appears in Mail and Safari although it looks like a new version of iWork will be needed to enable printing from Pages, Numbers and Keynote.

Mail - Unified mailbox works as advertised!

So in summary, an exceptionally stable beta which is close to final release. They just need to give iPad developers a couple of weeks to test and tweak their iPad apps to make advantage of the new iOS 4.2 features, get the new Apple TV out, update OSX to the next release and get the next version of iWork out.

Looking forward to it!