I been trying to decide whether to buy an iPad or kindle for a while now. I thought I would write up a quick explanation of why I ended up buying an ipad for anyone else out there trying to decide between the two.
Kindle
Basically I really like the new look of the kindle, it’s small, has a massive battery life and can hold 3500 books; furthermore it has some web browsing features and it can handle PDFs. I also heard it has some social media integration like Twitter but not sure whether that is actually true. I’m not a big reader and the reading I do is mostly on my iPhone just before I go to bed or when i’m on my pc going through my RSS reader catching up on all the blogs I follow. I did however think that because the kindle was so small and light and cheap I would be much more likely to carry it around and also the books I would buy would also sync with my iPhone kindle app. The final feature I was really keen on was the clipping and highlighting as I do this with normal books however I never go over them again and I though the kindle might solve this by having a library of clips I couldnsearch though.
iPad
I really like the idea of the iPad, ten hours battery, internet, lots of apps and just looks cool. The only things that were stopping me were the price and the fact it was Apples 1st attempt at a tablet and I remember the 1st iPhone being a bit rubbish. Moreover, no tethering, closed OS, no camera and did I mention it’s really expensive but it does have lots of apps.
Why I’ve ended up buying an iPad
It came down to a couple of things, I use my Google RSS reader a lot and the kindle doesn’t have apps that support this and I use Twitter a lot and again I wasn’t sure about the kindle’s integration with this. Also I came to the conclusion that I could use the iPad kindle app to buy all my books and if I ever decide to get a kindle they would just sync across anyway so no wasted money.
So now that I’ve got one
It’s great, it’s basically replaced my home computer and laptop for surfing the web and I have also found myself using my iPhone apps a lot less at home. I ended up getting the cheapest one as I didn’t want to be tied into a data plan and also I thought most my stuff would be on the cloud so I wouldn’t need a huge amount of storage. Before I took the plunge two friends highly recommend it for me and I’m glad they persuaded me because I love it, I’m just waiting for my case to turn up to I can bring it everywhere I go.
Things that are rubbish on the iPad
I have made a list of things which bug me with the iPad, some of them will get fixed when iOS 4 gets released for the iPad (currently on version 3), some will only bug me and some Steve Jobs will never fix.
- No multi-tasking
- Apps and websites that are built for the iPhone only look and work like shit for example Facebook app, Skype app, Google Reader website, google tasks etc.
- Speakers are in mono, could really do with a couple of speakers when watching video. Within the App store you cannot filter via free, paid and popular like when you view the app store from the iPhone.
- When the screen is dark, like when watching films, the reflection off the screen is really bad.
- No tabbed browsing for safari, this one really bugs me. They,ve basically used the same browser on the iPhone and it’s not enough. Tabs are really needed especially when surfing s few websites.
- No podcast subscribe you still have to sync with iTunes. I don’t mind this so much on my iPhone but syncing my iPad every couple of days is really annoying.
- Safari and apps seems to crash a lot but hopefully iOS 4 will fix this.
- Finally no flash, again don’t mind it too much on my iPhone but because my iPad is now my primary surfing tool I really notice the absence of flash.
Conclusion
I bought an iPad and haven’t looked back but I’m not using the kindle app as much as I hoped I would mainly because the apps and internet is too much of a distraction. Even with the looming samsung galaxy and blackberry play tablets on the horizon I still think the iPad is the best tablet around, at least until the iPad 2 is released. And what of the kindle? well I’m probably going to end up buying on of those as well, it’s only £110 after all.
Oh yeah, I also wrote this whole review on my iPad with the Wordpress app.