Living with the Ipad

I’ve been using my Ipad for a couple of weeks now, and thought it worth writing a little about the experience.

When it was first launched, I commented that “it’s just a big iPhone”, and that it really needed some killer apps and multi-tasking to take off. Well multi-tasking won’t arrive until IOS4.0, but there are some killer apps out there (for me, anyway). The first is Flipboard, which scrapes and aggregates content you are interested in, integrates tweets related to the content, and presents it in a very stylish, magazine type of interface. And it’s free. So far so good, for the user.

However, the sites where the content is scraped risk losing advertising revenue, because you may read their content through Flipboard without ever visiting the pages where it originally resided. And many of the organisations that own those sites are not happy at all.

Flipboard plan to generate revenue through their own advertising in the app, and offer a form of revenue share with content owners. If I was one of those content owners, I’d be pretty irritated by the deal. Visit the app store or the Flipboard site for more information.

Another superb app, although pretty pricey at £15.99 is the official Formula1 app for the 2010 season. I can’t really do it justice with words, but it provides almost real time telemetry from the cars (about a second faster than the BBC tv coverage via satellite), presented via timing screens exactly the same as the ones you see in use by teams on the pit wall. It also provides a gods eye view of the track and car positions, excellent when the tv is covering one car and you want to watch something else developing on the track. I used it during the Hungarian GP while watching the race on TV and it is superb. The telemetry is provided during all practice sessions as well as qualifying. http://www.formula1.com/news/headlines/2010/5/10829.html has more info.

Oh, and by the way, this post has been written on the Ipad using the excellent free WordPress app.