







For those that haven't seen it yet, here is Walt Mossberg's review summary video from the All Things Digital site, take a moment to watch it through, we have made a few observations below.
Over the last few weeks we have been discussing here at iPad Creative the potential of the iPad as a Publishing device and Walt makes a comment in his review about working with the Pages app and its integration with the ubiquitous Microsoft Word:
This is a serious content creation app that should help the iPad compete with laptops and can import Microsoft Office files. However, only the word processor exports to Microsoft’s formats, and not always accurately. In one case, the exported Word file had misaligned text. When I then tried exporting the document as a PDF file, it was unreadable.
Not all positive, but this is probably more about software compatability and can no doubt be enhanced by Apple in future updates, this is after all Version 1.0 of the iPad apps and we should probably expect things to take a while to settle down. But he does say that Pages is a 'serious content creation app', which we felt was the case after seeing Apple's walkthrough video.
Another area we are interested in is the iPad's handling of photos, and Walt encourages us a little by saying:
The photo app is striking, and much more like the one on the Mac than the one on the iPhone.
Still no word on editing our photos though, it looks like we will have to wait a few days for people to play with some of the iPhone apps on the iPad to see how it copes with this.
He then goes on to give a little bit of counter-balance by pointing out some of the things that we all know already, but that are missing from the iPad:
I did run into some other annoying limitations. For instance, the email program lacks the ability to create local folders or rules for auto-sorting messages, and it doesn’t allow group addressing. The browser lacks tabs. And the Wi-Fi-only version lacks GPS. Also, videophiles may dislike the fact that the iPad’s screen lacks wide-screen dimensions, so you either get black bars above or below wide-screen videos, or, if you choose an option to fill the screen, some of the picture may get cut off.
As we mentioned in our previous post, the review is on the whole positive and places the iPad in its own niche, not as a specific replacement for any other device. Check out the full review here.
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