iPad - a read only device?

I've been using the iPad for nearly 6 months now, and its a marvellous device. As a tool for informal consumption of media it is unrivalled. My 3 year old uses it to watch videos, whether at home, in the car or on the plane, and we really have to restrict his use of it. The interface to the iPad is so slick and intuitive that at 2.1/2 he new exactly how to get to his games and his videos.

I use it on the sofa to check up on the movies I might watch on TV (one of the downsides about the setup I currently have in the Philippines is an inadequate Electronic Programme Guide (EPG). I read novels on it, use Skype's chat facility (rarely use it as a phone though) and read my news through a newsreader (first Google Reader, then The Feed, and now trying Fliboard), as well as the BBC News App for serious news, and Wunderradio for BBC Radio 4 over here. And occasionally I'll play a game.

But you look at the list above, and there's no content creation. Despite its cheap enough price, I don't have Pages for the iPad because when I read the reviews all I get is the difficulty of getting content off the iPad and into a PC and ultimately into Word where I can attempt to monetize the content I generate (the bottom line).

I'm not even writing this post on the iPad, though maybe I should try.

And lastly, I had just got hooked on Klok for time management. Whilst I was programming on PCs this made perfect sense. For any monetised project I would spend 80% of the productive time in front of my laptop, and my laptop is a big beast, luggable but not portable. For portable use I have my iPad don't I?

Except the iPad doesn't support Klok. And with good reason. Small apps from small, growing companies should pick a platform and first, keep their user base happy. They should examine the potential growth of supporting a new platform, and the cost associated with developing for it (including the lost opportunity cost of resources deployed away from their primary platform).

Klok have chosen Adobe Air, and to be fair to them, they now have a mobile version for Android, running on Adobe Air of course. Had I an Android phone this would be great. Just at the moment I don't even have a Smartphone (if I need Smarts, I have my iPad remember).

So inadequate content generation, no native Skype app (it's still the iPhone app after more than a year) and my particular time management application is unsupported.

Lastly, I should mention, here in the Philippines, WiFi is by no means ubiquitous, or reliable even when it should be available.

Starbucks for instance charge P100 (a little over US$2.00) for an hour's WiFi, on top of your coffee. Seattle's Best Coffee (20m away in the GreenBelt mall for example) offer free WiFi for an hour (and are owned by Starbuck's anyway). The Asian Development Bank library has free WiFi provided you deposit your ID (why?) and it doesn't work (free and worth what you pay for it). At home, my WiFi connection is reliable, but my ISP thinks nearly 98% uptime is sufficient for a consumer line, that means they can go down 2 or 3 times an hour during peak times, rendering Skype, internet radio and even web browsing almost unusable in peak times (Sky Broadband (Philippines) I do mean you).

Is it any better in the developed world? Maybe a little, but its still too early for Google's world of always online solutions (on a Chromium netbook) to be of any real value. Sync to the cloud by all means. Couldn't live without that, particularly DropBox. But live in the cloud? Not yet.

So, read on an iPad, write on a laptop. A shame, but that's still how it is.

I wonder what the iPad 2 will bring?

I wonder if multiple users will be a possibility - but that discussion is for another time.