But I only wanted to take a picture of it for the blog. I swear. However, any further attempt to extricate said iPad would result in my arm being removed at the socket and me being beaten to death with it, so, here, have a picture of my wife threatening death to anyone (read: me) planning on separating her from her new toy.
In other news: Hey, there’s an iPad in the house. For which I blame Tobias Buckell, who took his iPad to PenguiCon, where my wife got to play with it and thus decided she wanted one for her own. I had been manfully resisting picking one up for myself, choosing to get a netbook instead because I’m one of those people who actually needs a keyboard on his tiny portable computing device. But when Krissy decides she wants something, that’s pretty much that.
Of course, I did play with it a bit today, when it arrived and I spent a couple of hours customizing it for the missus. It is unsurprisingly nicely put together, and in playing with the virtual keyboard I have to say in landscape mode it’s very nearly acceptable for typing. But not quite; it still has weird quirks to slow you down if you’re actually trying to get work done (like either changing the virtual keyboard to access the apostrophe or holding down the comma button for a second for it to show up), as if to remind you it’s a device for the consumption of media rather than the creation of it. I can see it being fine for short e-mails and other things not requiring a long slog of typing/editing/whatever but less so otherwise. Yes, I know I can bluetooth a keyboard to it. But then, that’s why I have a netbook with an actual keyboard. No bluetooth required.
Krissy doesn’t plan to write a novel on it, or indeed anything more complicated than an e-mail, so this is not a problem. She largely intends to use it for the purpose it has been constructed: Consumption of media, and specifically books and films (the former through the three e-book apps I downloaded for her, the latter by way of Netflix, whose app for the iPad is really quite nice), and also the occasional game and what have you. She’s is not particularly bothered by the various geek concerns regarding the iPad, i.e., it’s a closed system or what have you. Like most humans, she wants something that works, rather than something she has to work on to make it work.
As for me, I may be allowed to look at it from time to time, but there’s really no question whose baby it is. If you see me soon missing an upper limb, you’ll know I tried to keep it too long. Hopefully it won’t come to that.
The Blatherations of Others