NGG

As some of you know, I have been complaining that I have been on the Notify Me list with my local Apple store for a week and a half now waiting for my iPad to arrive. Its extremely frustrating, they don’t give you any update ever. You are supposed to just wait around for them to email you some day to let you know that you have 24 hours to come and get it or you forfeit it. One representative who answered the phone when I called to query about the status even got a bit snotty with me because I asked a follow up question. Her reply was simply a repeat of what she had just said as if I didn’t hear it the first time.

I have spent a good bit of this time reading other people’s reviews and checking out the apps that have been released. I think this is the most frustrating part of it. One person shredded theirs to see if it blended, another person hates it and can’t find a good use for it. Meanwhile there are hundreds, if not thousands of us who still can’t get our hands on one.

One twitter user randomly read one of my posts and told me I should spend my time reading about the device. DUH!

Probably the most frustrating of all is the number of blogs with poor or inaccurate information. Most of these users seem to either not understand the device, or they haven’t taken the time to look around to see what all it can do. A great example of this happened the other day. One of my friends has an iPad, and he was so happy that he could use the Citrix Receiver to connect to our office to use Microsoft Office on it. I asked him why he didn’t buy the iWork suite (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) and just use that instead? He told me he thought they were just viewers. Clearly he didn’t read anything.

Another more recently posted blog entry (I won’t point any fingers) was complaining about not being able to “hyperlink” from within pages. His use case was that he writes his blog entries in a word processor, and then copies and pastes them into the blog. He mentioned that he wasn’t a fan of putting in HTML code in his posts, so he preferred to hyperlink from within the word processor. So, because of this flaw in Pages, the iPad itself was frustrating him, and he would have to resort to emailing the posts in and therefore wouldn’t be able to use the tagging and categories. I don’t even know where to begin with this one. First of all, if you are hyperlinking from a word processor, it is still coding the HTML for you. Just because the application does it FOR you doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. Second of all a word processor isn’t a blogging tool. It wasn’t designed for blogging. Why would you think that you should do this? His web browser doesn’t work?? What kind of ancient arcane blog software is he using that doesn’t let him edit the text within the browser? And, I have to ask, none of the blogging tools on the iPhone or iPad hyperlink? Really? I mean, I haven’t gotten mine yet so I don’t know, but I find that really hard to believe.

Another thing I keep reading is that there is no USB port. What do you think the dock connector is? Sure, you have to buy the connector from Apple for $29, that sucks. But really and truly, what is it your trying to do with the USB connector? Print? I’m sorry, I would much rather print wirelessly. Unplugging my printer from my computer every time I want to print from my iPad would drive me insane. Keyboard? Go bluetooth. Why wouldn’t you?? Camera, oh yeah, that connector is for the camera. What else? The dock cable already plugs into your computer. Check out this review of the USB and SD connector:  http://bit.ly/drBFiK

I would love to be posting my first opinions of the iPad, good or bad in place of this rant, but unfortunately, well, you know….