The Apple Addiction Continues…
About a week ago, I was discussing with a colleague the pain of not finding any Apple iPads for sale in Sydney. It’d been around 4 weeks since they were released into the Aussie market, yet I couldn’t find one anywhere. I wanted to turn up to a store, plop down the plastic, and walk away with a new iPad. Simple strategy, but finding one was difficult, to impossible.
Early that afternoon, his girlfriend IM’d him, and said that some were available from Nextbyte Broadway, so I rang them and confirmed that they were indeed in stock. Fifteen minutes later, my colleague and I were handing over money, and I’d finally laid my hands on a new 32Gb 3G iPad.
I was getting a bit desperate, you see, as I was due to head off to the Sydney Bears v Gold Coast Bluetongues game being held that weekend at Penrith – a night of tweeting for the Bears beckoned, and I was keen to see how the 3G iPad would handle.
It took me about an hour or so to unbox, do the initial sync, and refresh apps. It took me longer to unlock the micro-sim card. When I saw the sim activate and show the “Telstra Mobile” with signal strength, I thought that was it, right?
Wrong!
I turn up to the ice arena, whip out the iPad, have everyone nearby drool over it for a while, and then fired up Twitterific.
“No connection to the Internet”, it replied. What!?
I settled down when the game began, pulled out the iPhone, and started tweeting. A thought crossed my mind about the APN settings on the iPad, as they were blank. Recalling how we set up 3G at work, I typed in “telstra.internet” into the APN field, and voilà! The iPad was connected to the Internet at last.
Tweeting from the iPad was chalk and cheese comparable to the iPhone. It’s so much faster to type on, as the keypad in landscape mode is just the right size for touch typing. I enjoyed interacting with the iPad, and as a result, spammed Twitter with game updates. I had 5 bars of Telstra NextG coverage inside of the ice arena, so connectivity to the Internet (and twitter) was surprisingly fast.
I use Twitterific HD, by the way.
Just yesterday, I worked out how to get my DVDs onto the iPad. I already have Handbrake, but it’s currently not aware of the iPad (but an update is in development, apparently). Some more searching led me to a page with some iPad presets for Handbrake, so using those, I’m now able to rip my DVDs with Handbrake, import them into iTunes, and sync them across to the iPad, and watch them in fullscreen landscape mode. The video is quit good, but not pristine. It’s likely that the presets aren’t quite right, but I don’t mind.
It’s great to curl up in a warm bed, prop the iPad up, and watch shows and movies. The screen is big, but not too big, and with the great battery life, its possible to watch lots of shows (awesome when confined to bed sick these past few days…).
Anyway, its time to finish this update, which I’ve typed on the iPad, and used the WordPress app to upload and publish.
Life is good!