Kindle or iPad 3?

[Dannyalcatraz]

As a long-time Apple fan this is one of the hardest hurdles to get over when talking with PC/Windows fans. Apple tends to have the ideology of, "Make it user friendly, even if that means less power," whereas PC vendors tend to have the mentality of, "More, MORE, MOAR!!!1!"

Yup- all that power is useless if it won't let you do the job as intended.

I'm a longtime Apple fan because of their user friendliness. Back in my college days, I watched my roomies & suitemates constantly fiddling with their PCs to get them to work. Many of their papers were done on my Apple IIe because it almost never quit.

I've tried other machines- mostly out of necessity, like running particular machines or specific programs (I'm too lazy to use emulator software or chips)- and I keep finding them coming up short in intuitive software design or stability. It's not like I haven't had problems with my Apple products, but with only a couple of exceptions, they've all been ridiculously minor, and some machines never saw the inside of a repair shop until they were several years obsolete.

 

[Kzach]

Whatever device you use to read a Kindle book, your place (and notes) are saved across all devices. I can read the same book on my phone, my iPad and my desktop computer, and it stays synched through all devices.

So even if you don't have a Kindle or an iPad now, there's no reason to not buy and read books now, and just read them on your computer or phone. (The Kindle reader software is free.)

Ah, ok. I find I can't read for too long on a computer screen but that still might be a good idea. Part of the reason for wanting this is that my friend and I want to write a science fiction TV series. It's been something we've talked about for years but I always relegated it to a conversation topic rather than a serious endeavour. Recently, he's decided he wants to take it further but one of my reservations is that I find it difficult to explain to him various important concepts about story-crafting. My solution was an agreement to read one science fiction (as opposed to sci-fi) book a month. I'm already a week behind on reading Ender's Game

 

[Hand of Evil]

While I adore my Ipad for almost everything, the touch keyboard is lousy for more than a few short sentences of typing. I do all my composition on my regular desktop.

The keypad takes up a noticeable but not aggravating amount of space. The problem is that you are essentially doing hunt-peck typing. There's no way to do two-handed real typing.

I have not tried any of the attachable keyboards.

Note on keyboard, in OS5 the on-screen keyboard pulls apart and if you are a thumb typer works well. On the iPAD 3, with its new screen, typing is better. You get use to it.

I use a Kingston case keyboard, it is not a bad option, still "small" (length of screen) but meets my needs.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

There's no way to do two-handed real typing.

Not at full speed, perhaps, but I still manage to use proper form.

 

[Gilladian]

Not at full speed, perhaps, but I still manage to use proper form.

Thanks, Danny, and HandofEvil both - I had never played with the undocked or split keyboards. Undocking it let me use proper form, and speeded me up considerably! I'm very grateful for that!

But the split keyboard becomes WAAAAAY tiny, and my big hands just won't handle it.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Yeah, me too- I only use it rarely because I have fairly fat fingers.

 

[Chairman7w]

I'm a big time recommender of the iPad.

I have a first gen iPad and it's the greatest thing I've ever bought. SO many different uses and Aps, it's wonderful. And if you travel - there's NO better travel tool to me.

I use it EVERY day. If I lost it today, I would buy a new one tomorrow. I love it.

I know there are other tablets that "do" the same things (maybe even cheaper), but as somebody else had mentioned, Apple has really cornered the market on ease-of-use and functionality (even if it's at the expense of power).

In my book (ebook?), the user experience is SO much more important that the power specs on the side of the box. Frankly, I'm befuddled that other people don't feel that way.

So - that's my .02. Get the iPad.

 

[lmbarns]

How are apple devices any easier to use?

I have an android phone and tablet, and you press "apps" to display your apps, slide through until you see the one you want, and you touch it.

Hell on the tablet all the recently used apps are on the desktop, you can swipe to flip through them and touch the one you want to load....

I mean mobiles in general are dumbed down, I dunno what you guys are talking about.

Also on a desktop, Mac's are terribly un user friendly to anyone who has used a PC. I mean, the first thing you do on a PC when you're stuck is to "right click" and look at your options. Few things piss me off more than my few encounters with Apple products. lol But I guess I've been using PC's for about 20 years now since windows 3.11 on my 486 and I've taken a couple of the Microsoft certifications toward the MCSA, so I'm more familiar with window's than I care to be.

 

[Chairman7w]

Hahahaha -you took ONE process (the easiest thing to do on either device) and held that up as your example?

If that's your measuring stick, then OK, fair enough, you win.

The user experience is much more then starting your App, however. It's connecting to your PC. It's DL'ing Apps. It's having quality Apps. It's App stability. It's compatibility.

In my opinion (and that's all it is: Opinion, I've not used every system device in the world), Apple's the best at making all that an easy, elegant experience.

If you think the Android system (or whatever system you're referring to) is universally easy to use on all the devices that use it, and just as easy to use as the Apple product... OK. I'm not gonna argue with ya.

I will admit that you just touch the one you want to use, same as on the iPad though.

NOTE: I'm referring to the iPad btw, never been a Mac user myself.

How are apple devices any easier to use?

I have an android phone and tablet, and you press "apps" to display your apps, slide through until you see the one you want, and you touch it.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

How are apple devices any easier to use?

As you say, it may largely be because of familiarity.

However, my experience with my LG smartphone- admittedly, barely had it for a month...because its LG's latest and greatest- has been an exercise in frustration, and not because of familiarity.

1) Several of the functions I've tried on both my LG and my Apple products have required an extra step. That doesn't seem like much, but it gets annoying over time. It also takes more time in aggregate. Its annoyingly inefficient.

On the Apple mobile devices, all of your apps are on the desktop. However, you can jump directly from any app into one of your frequently used ones with a double-tap of the Home button and tapping the other app's icon. Can you do that on any of the non-Apples? (I honestly don't know; I'm asking a genuine question.) There are also a couple of "pinch" and "sweep" maneuvers that let you do similar tricks on the iPads even more quickly.

2) When I don't use my iPod Touch or iPad for surfing the net for a while, all the browser windows I had open when I left are still there later. So far, my LG has shut all of my browser windows on me 3 times, bringing me back up to a single Google window when I open my browser.

3) I have yet to have a problem typing a response on my Apple product on any of the online forums I visit with just its stock apps. However, on ENWorld, the LG occasionally and randomly moves my cursor between my placing it and my starting to type on my virtual keypad. This makes visiting ENWorld on my LG an absolute chore.

On Ultimate Guitar's forums, the LG has a different trick. When I orient my LG on its side- as I often do because of my fat fingers- it orients the top of the thread response window outside of the visible screen. When I manually reset the screen so I can see the window, it jumps back to its original position. IOW, I can't see what I'm typing at all. I have to trust in my skills as a touch typist...which I really can't on a virtual keyboard. I actually took it to Verizon to make sure I wasn't doing something wrong. It did exactly the same for their techs. Their response- "Don't type in the sideways orientation." (Helpful, right?) No such issue with the Apple products.

4) took some pictures & movies of Edgefest and of my Mom's dogs. According to my LG, the pictures were too big to send via gmail, end of story. If there is a way to share it, I can't find it. In contrast, in the same situation (movie too big to send) my iPad2 asks me if I want to send an edited version of the movie, and lets me choose which section (and how much) I want to send. And then I can go back and take another section and send it. This is in its stock photo app. This means that it's dead simple for me to share big movies with my Apples, and so far, impossible with the LG.

I've had other problems as well, such as the LG becoming painfully hot to touch and telling me to unplug it while recharging on a (universal) car charger (from Verizon) with which it had worked just fine several times before, and did not recharge. I unplugged it and tried it on its home charger...where it went from 45% charged to 12%. I rechecked its connections- nothing was loose- and tried again, and it recharged properly. Nothing like that has ever happened to me with my mobile Apple devices.



Those were the ones that bugged me the most. How much of it is attributable to malfunction as opposed to it just doing things the way it is designed to do things I cannot say.