New Addition to my Mobile Productivity Arsenal – the Apple iPad

I told myself I’d show constraint and not pre-order an iPad before the official launch date—they might be buggy, there might be hardware or battery issues, the price might come down.  I kept repeating that to myself.  

One April afternoon, a week after the official release, I thought I’d take a drive to the local Apple store to see and touch one in-person.  First impression – “Wow, this is cool”!   When I heard the salesman tell me he thought they might still have one single 16GB model left in stock, my self-restraint fell by the wayside as I quickly pulled out my credit card!

I left it “naked” for the first few weeks trying to figure out what kind of case and accessories I really wanted.  I finally decided on an hp Netbook neoprene case (it’s small enough to slide in along side my laptop in my laptop bag, and flexible enough to fold in half and use as a prop-up pad to rest the iPad on my lap at a good reading angle.  It also fits the iPad absolutely perfectly!).

I also decided on this minimal, but very effective, silicone cover that provides more “grip” when holding it (the aluminum back is just too slippery itself)—the iFrogz Soft Gloss Clear Case 

My absolute favorite accessory so far, though, is the Camera Connection Kit – a set of 2 small 30-pin connectors, one that has a USB slot, and the other that has an SD Card slot. 

This is absolutely the best $29 I’ve ever spent!  As a photographer, I always lugged my laptop around and downloaded CF and SD cards at night to see the photos I had taken that day and keep a backup copy of the files.  Now that I have a heavy 16” laptop, it was becoming quite a pain.  But no more!  Now, I can plug my CF card reader (or SLR itself) into the USB connector and the iPad will import my Canon RAW files directly.  It also imports both JPG and Video files off my Point-and-Shoot camera’s SD card and gives me a great, immediate way to view images and videos.   As a bonus, the USB connector also accepts any USB computer keyboard or headset—great for typing long email messages, novels, long Skype conference calls, etc!

Only downside, is now I wish I would have bought the larger capacity iPad!  I originally thought 16GB would be plenty as I keep my music on my iPhone and most everything else online in the cloud.  But now that I see this can be used as a photo/video backup storage/viewing device, I wish I had more than the current 5 GBs of remaining space I have available…oh well, it’ll be a reason to upgrade next year when the video camera-version comes out :-)