iPad 2: 5 Lessons

After a week with the iPad 2, I’ve come to some conclusions and debunked a few myths. Here are five things I learned:

1. Apple was right not to invest much in the rear-facing camera. I’ve used it once, and that was just to test it out. As far as I can tell, there’s no actual need for it.

2. FaceTime just might be the most over-hyped, useless feature ever.

3. Unless you’re a professional photographer with some serious equipment, you won’t be using the Apple iPad Connection Kit very often, if at all.

Given that the iPhone has become the world’s most popular camera, and iPhone pictures can be easily uploaded to the cloud and downloaded onto the iPad, there’s absolutely no reason Apple should charge $30 for a camera connector. Bad Apple!

4. If an iPad is the only device you work from you’ll need to learn some workarounds and perhaps jump through some hoops as some of the apps are very quirky and not very accommodating.

For example: I write stories on iA Writer because it’s so easy; iA Writer is one of five iPad productivity apps under $5. But there’s no way to turn off auto-correct (or delete the auto-corrected word), so I’m often stuck with a word I don’t want and can’t change. It’s a bug that needs to be fixed.

Once the story is completed, I copy and paste into a Quickoffice for the iPad Word document, upload to Dropbox, go to my laptop, download from Dropbox, save the Word doc on the laptop, and send to my editor. (Quickoffice and Dropbox are must-have iPad productivity tools.)

The reason? I need to work with the document on my laptop because we use editing features in Word, which are not supported in the light QuickOffice for iPad version.

I’ve tried writing in QuickOffice directly, skipping iA Writer, but there’s a lag between the time I strike a key and when it appears on the screen. So not using iA Writer isn’t a viable option.

5. iPad critics claim you won’t be able to live without a PC’s mousepad and full keyboard. That’s ridiculous.

After only a couple of days, I find I prefer the Apple Wireless Keyboard over my laptop keyboard because of the light touch of the keys. And I can get around a document using the arrow keys, as well as capturing text by holding down the SHIFT key.

I was worried that reaching out to touch the iPad screen repeatedly would cramp up my fingers and arms. On the contrary, I found it faster and easier scrolling Web pages and tapping virtual buttons than trying to navigate an arrow using a mousepad.

Yesterday, I worked on both the iPad and my laptop for a head-to-head comparison. The outcome: I was consistently and frequently drawn to the iPad. I’d type on the Apple Wireless Keyboard whenever I had the chance. When I was on the laptop, I’d catch myself occasionally (and erroneously) reaching out to touch the screen.

Tom Kaneshige covers Apple and Networking for CIO.com. Follow Tom on Twitter @kaneshige. Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline and on Facebook. Email Tom at tkanshige@cio.com