This Ain’t No iPAD
After several months of trying to use an iPad as an always present device to access the web, I gave up.
The iPad is a toy. It is fine for simple web browsing or watching movies… as long as these movies are purchased from Apple.
Inside the Apple world, the Amazon might as well be a river in Brazil. The music and movie collection on my PC is only accessible if I am willing to infect my desktop with the monstrous presence of iTunes.
Enter the “Surface.” This ain’t no iPad. As far as I can see, Microsoft has put no limits on this machine. I can buy things from Amazon, and getting things from my desktop to the Surface is as easy as using a USB drive, just as I do with every other device I own.
There are a lot of reasons why the iPad is just a toy. The iPad lacks 2 simple things that are normal in today’s world as credit cards. The first is simple hardware access via a USB port. I first ran into problems with the iPad. When I discovered that I could not get files from my Sony Nex 7 camera onto the iPad. All I wantewd was to post some images on the web! After a two-hour stint with the Genius Bar in Boston, the best the Genius or I could do was to import the files to a Mac, convert them from the standard XC file format used by today’s SD cards, and then email them to myself. This is absurd.
Oh yeh, my WordPress editor does not work very well with Apple’s Safari because, as noted below, Mr. Jobs hated the files and folders the editor ASSUMES are present on any computer.
As I thought about this, it occurred to me that the simple business of having a USB port, hugely changes the value of a tablet. For example, I can plug-in any USB drive on a Surface! This includes the compact half terabyte drive I use now to carry files from home to work. I also use this to store photographs while I am traveling. Plugging that drive into the Surface means that I can review my files on a large screen and select which ones I want to share with friends or post on the Internet. On an IPad .. no lick!
The surface has another “innovative feature” that is lacking on iPad. That feature is the presence of a file system! I suspect few people reading this blog remember the day when Microsoft first introduced files and folders to its OS. Steve Jobs sneered. He was unable to understand lesser humans than himself. He saw no needs for organizing computer files into folders rather than keeping them in one huge heap.
Jobs was wrong. Apple’s Mac Operating System was soon changed to add the same files, folders, and directory system already in use by every Windows, CPM, or UNIX machine. Until, the iPad. The iPad uses. Steve Jobs’ heap. The way this works is that you cannot actually open a file on an iPad. You have to open an application and then find the file within the application. The files belong to individual applications. If you delete an application, then you also delete all of its files. You are out of luck if that same file might be used by another application already on the iPad, or one that you might install later.
I ran into this problem with my iPad because I wanted to use it to read papers in PDF format. As with my problems with my camera, getting PDFs onto the tablet was a a pain in the ass. For example, if I went to a journal site to download a file to the iPad, there was no way to do this. The best I or the freindly Genius could do was either to download Pdfs first to a PC and transfer them or, if the site allowed this, email a copy to myself and then open the file with an application on the iPad.
Not all is bad in iPad land. I found a number of interesting PDF readers in the iTunes Store. I installed 4 of these and used them for some different purposes … Until my 16 GB iPad ran out of space. I went back to a Genius Bar. It turns out, that without a file system, there was no simple way to delete files or move them to storage in the cloud. It appeared that the best way to clean up by 16 GB machine might be to buy no one!
My bottom line is this: the Surface does everything an iPad can do and a lot more. If you want to use a tablet as a professional device, get a Surface.
By the way, the Surface is considerably cheaper than a comparable iPad. I purchased on the top of the line Surface for $700. This included the keyboard and a full version of Office optimized for use on the surface.