All About The iPad

Just completed my first serious long haul flight with the iPad, travelling to WWDC in San Francisco. I have own before with the iPad on the way back from New York, but I didn’t really have chance to set it up with some in flight entertainment.

When I say long haul, I mean long haul. Manchester to Newark (8 hours) a 3 hour stop over and then Newark to San Francisco (6 hours).

The previous day, I’d purchased some TV shows from iTunes and downloaded them to the iPad. I’d also wanted to encode some ripped movies I had.

Initially, I used the Turbo h.264 HD USB stick from Elgato Systems. The Turbo H.264 HD software has not been updated with an iPad preset (although the Elgato forums indicate one is in the works) but they recommend using an Apple TV preset. I used my home theatre Mac Mini with the Turbo H.264 HD card to run some tests.

Unfortunately, not all the movies played on the iPad, so we really need the iPad presets for the Turbo H.264 HD

Plan B was to fall back to a free utility called Handbreak. I tested both the Universal preset and the Apple TV preset and both worked fine. The Apple TV preset produced larger files but noticeably sharper. It was a lot slower running this on the Mac mini (the Elgato USB stick does have a dedicated encoding chip built in) so I transferred the encoding jobs to the Mac Pro and let it run. 

A couple of hours later and I had a ton of stuff to watch on the plane. 

I decided to take the 32GB iPad with me for reasons I’ll explain in a later post, and even with a dozen TV Shows and seven full length movies, I still had gigabytes of space left.

Of course, the videos looked gorgeous on the iPad and played back faultlessly. 

The form factor is just perfect for a tray table in coach (no business class for me!) although I felt the angle using the Apple case was slightly too shallow, soon rectified by propping up with a glasses case.  

I did treat myself to a set of Bose QuietComfort15 Noise Cancelling headphones on a previous trip. Used in conjunction with the iPad, they make an unbeatable media experience. I did get a little worried during the first 8 hour flight as the in flight entertainment system crashed and they couldn’t get it back online. I felt very guilty watching my HD movies whilst everyone around me was reduced to playing Solitaire on the consoles!

As well as watching movies, I also read the Wired magazine and accessed a few apps as well. 

Battery life held up incredibly well with it dropping to around 41% after the first flight. I did have a spare external battery with me so I gave it a boost to around 48% whilst waiting for the second flight. By the time I got to my hotel room, it still had 10% left so the boost wasn’t really necessary.

So in all, a fantastic experience and a must for anyone travelling fairly regularly.