...stuff I do and things I like...

Friday, April 09 2010

iPad mini review (in Germany)

Share photos on twitter with TwitpicI got an iPad yesterday and played with it all day and night. Here my mini review.

First, because I live in Germany I can not use my normal AppStore account right now since the iPad is not officially soled here in Germany and therefore access is blocked for me. Easy solution is to create a US AppleID and use the US AppStore. No big problem just a pain in the ass.

The first thing I tried even before creating a US AppleID was the web browser and the PDF viewer's quality. As reported by other people both are quite good. Web browsing is way more fun then on the laptop. This is just browsing not working or researching something on the net. Safari on the iPad is HTML-5 capable which is really cool. Also more media-heavy sites need to support HTML-5.

Google maps is also really fun on the iPad. Just putting the iPad on a table and pan around is really impressive (I know - no magic here - just a fast CPU).

The iPad AppStore is still pretty weak. A few good apps exist but most of them actually cost money. The comic book stuff looks real good. Also I'm not a big Marvel fan. The ABC app looks super awesome but since I live in Germany I can't use it to watch TV shows (I guess I have to get a tunnel to the US to try it).

Finally a small list of stuff I want for the iPad:
  • jailbreak - to install what ever I want
  • Stand alone PDF viewer - where I can add notes (I would pay for this)
  • The browser should NOT advertise itself as a mobile browser. Many sites disable some functionality because of this