iPad Update Day 1: What’s worked so far

So day one has gone by, and I got a chance to goof around a little with the iPad, and here are my findings so far.

First off, iTunes doesn’t really distinguish between apps for the iPad and iPhone, so if you’re like me I have upwards of 300+ applications in iTunes. Partly because I’m lazy and haven’t widdled down my apps list. So, I definitely didn’t let iTunes automatically sync my apps. So, I had to manually plow through all my apps one at a time, since iTunes was nice enough to check every one of them, and unselect the ones I wanted… a UNCHECK ALL would have been nice to have here…

Once my selected apps were loaded, I tried a few out. I was disappointed to learn a few didn’t work. Most did though, and after an App Store update on a few of them, I noticed some that updated themselves to iPad versions!

Here’s a list of what I tried today:

1. Navigon
2. Metal Gear Solid
3. Shrek Kart
4. Kids vs Zombies
5. Spore Origins
6. Sketchbook Mobile
7. Tetris
8. Mocha VNC
9. Time Crisis
10. Pocket Informant

So how did things go? Well, Navigon started up fine, but once I pressed “Show Map” I was tossed back to the desktop. Metal Gear Solid was updated to a real iPad app, which was very nice! All the other apps on the list worked fine with the exception of Spore Origins, it did a quick dump to the desktop right after the startup screen… Mocha VNC, which is a remote desktop application, worked real nice; having the larger view made it easier to read things on my remote computers. Time Crisis was almost a bit unfair, because the screen was bigger, so my accuracy was actually better. I also discovered that the speakers on the iPad are pretty loud too.

My wife, later in the day, was able to go to a Hong Kong newspaper web site (http://www.mingpao.com) and was able to easily and comfortably read the Chinese web site with no difficulties. So she’s enjoying the larger screen size for web browsing.

My last test of the evening was to see if I can get the iPad to display my library of PDF’s, since this form factor SCREAMS to be able to do this. I heard about a file sharing option the iPad would have, but it turns out that this option must be purchased through an application which supports it. So you’ll need to dish out $10 for any of the iWork applications, but even then the file sharing is application specific. So there’s still no easy way without buying someone’s application to get files you want, but alas, Pages doesn’t support PDF’s, but after digging through the App Store I decided to try myPDF for $.99. Once Pages and myPDF were installed, iTunes gave me a spot in my Apps tab of my iPad labeled File Sharing. In this section I was able to choose the app I want to share files with and add files to its storage location, and in this case, myPDF worked very nicely! I was able to drop a bunch of my PDF’s in and I was able to read them on my iPad… Nice!

So to sum up day 1. Spore Origins, and Navigon didn’t work. Reading online newspapers in Chinese was impressive on the bigger screen and Reading PDF’s was successful with myPDF.