Apple iPad - Is it ready for you?

I've been interested in the Apple iPad even before it was released. While I don't have one - yet - I wanted to see if it would be all that it was claimed to be.

My wife has been interested in this item as well. Normally she isn't all that excited about electronic gadgets, but she had hoped to use it to read books. She reads a LOT of books that are borrowed from the library. But she's yet to read a book electronically.

The Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader are products that could compete against the iPad in this area. But both of these devices are just black and white units and she doesn't like that. And, the display screens are smaller in size as well. So she had high hopes that the iPad would be a good choice.

We contacted the company that makes electronic books available to our local library and asked if the iPad would be supported for their software. But at the time, the iPad had yet to be available for testing, so we had to wait until they were able to test an actual unit with their eBooks. They held true to their word and emailed us as soon as they had a chance to test the machine.

The conclusion was that since the iPad had the same OS (operating system) as the Apple iTouch, the iPad would work with their audio software. But, the iTouch and the iPad will not read any of their books since the iPad does not work with Adobe PDF, Adobe EPUB or Mobipocket.

Because of this, we won't be getting an iPad - yet - but have hopes that maybe one day either the iPad will read the downloadable books that are offered by our library or that the library will start offering books that can be read on an iPad. That could take a little time.

No matter really, because we also found out that some other features which we think would be good to have, aren't a part of the iPad either. For instance, currently, the iPad cannot do multitasking. It can only do one thing at a time. Rumors have it that Apple will be addressing this issue soon, so that's good. Another thing we don't like is that it does not support flash websites. Considering how many sites are shown in flash (including my own websites), that's not good. And, we feel it would be nice if the iPad had a built-in camera so that you could use services like Skype and not have to attach an external camera to the iPad.

These issues could all be addressed in the future. But for now, the iPad doesn't have the features we think it should. So we will be anxiously awaiting the next generation of iPad to see what will be included. (Image borrowed from the internet)