Any iPad owners here?

[Grandturk]

Been using mine recently to look at guitar tabs on app Guitar Pro. Pretty cool.

[Shawn Lutz]

I have the smaller version called the iPhone 4

[Shawn Lutz]

I saw a pedal board that had a dock for an iPad so you could use the pedal sim apps

[Hellbat]

I saw a pedal board that had a dock for an iPad so you could use the pedal sim apps

http://digitech.com/en-US/products/ipb-10

[BenoA]

Thanks everyone for all the replies.

My wife got some questions:

Is it easy to read email attachements such as pdf, word documents and powerpoints?

When writing an email, is it easy to add photos to it or other files?

[Hellbat]

PDF support is built in. It's basic PDF functionality, just reading but it works for the most part. If Word and Powerpoint are important features for your wife she will need the Pages and Keynote apps. (Numbers would be another app if she needs Excel functionailty.) They will allow you to open MS Office documents, but they won't render exactly the same as they would in the native applications. If she needs to annotate PDF's or wants better than the basic PDF reading functionality I would recommend the GoodReader app. I think they are all $5 apps. The Apple ones (Pages, Keynote, Numbers) might be $10 though. I bought them the day they came out so the memory is a little hazy.

Keep in mind though that the iPad isn't a great platform for content creation. I wouldn't want to do much more than correcting spelling errors on the iPad.

And yeah, if you get ahold of it, get TabToolkit from Agile. It's a killer learning app. http://agilepartners.com/apps/tabtoolkit/

[BenoA]

Thanks Hellbat for the infos.

It's funny, I'll be buying it for my wife and I don't really plan to use it (I know I know, I will eventualy ). She'll be using it the passive way. No work plan on it except for writing emails. She be mostly browsing, reading emails and docs, watching videos and playing Spider Solitaire (she's addicted to the game and I don't comment her addiction as she let's me buy gear as I wish ).

I'll have her laptop for my guitar use: slowing down MP3, metronome, Reaper for recording and watching guitar videos. So I'll be trading the iPad for a decent dual core laptop.

Anyway, I just discovered that their is an Apple store not too far from the office, so on lunch time, I'm going there to try one out. May come back with one...

[BenoA]

So as said above, I went to the Apple store on lunch time.

My wife's laptop will be at the shop (under warranty) for a while as the deffective hard drive is on back order... And yesterday, she complained about the home computer being slow, as the kids put too much stupid stuff in it... And that computer is starting to show its age too...

You guessed it... 15 minutes with an iPad2 and I was sold. So I bought a 32mb wifi model.

I had never tried one and in fact, it felt like a bigger iTouch (as the one my kids have).

Wife doesn't know yet. And I will only let her know once the kids will be sleeping (which will be really late as you know teenagers). Anyway, I don't want them to jump on it as bees on honey.

Man, I wonder why I bought her a laptop a couple of months before instead of an iPad. It's so clever, easy to use, fast and unique. I just hope she will like it. They gave me a coupon so she will be able to go back to an Apple store (we got one not too far from home) and get a free course on how to use and set it up. I think it's a brilliant marketing idea!

I'll keep ya all posted.

[BenoA]

OK everyone. This iPad thing flat out rocks! Awesome gizmo. For someone only doing internet/email stuff it can surely replace a laptop.

Any "must have" appz I should be looking at?

[Hellbat]

Most of the apps listed below are free, now a lot of companies just charge you for content.

For reading iBooks and Kindle.
Zinio for magazine subscriptions. I subscribe to Guitar Player and Guitarist magazines (among others) on the iPad and it's a great way to read them.
If you like comics, I use an app called Xcomics. It's not bad but I'm not really a comic guy so there could be better.

Music apps (this is more for when you get your hands on it haha) :
Get the Soundcloud app if you have a Soundcloud account you want to access mobile.
Garage Band is very cool even just to play around with.
The Instant Drummer series is awesome if you want to throw together killer sounding drum loops with LEGO like ease. I'm not a fan of the way each "song/style" is a seperate app though. If they did it as a master app with "modules" it would be cleaner in the UI.
For amp/effect modelling, soundwise I give the edge to AmpKit+ with the caveat that I think you need the Peavey I/O interface to avoid extreme feedback.
TabToolkit as earlier linked is a great app that supports guitar pro tabs as well as working with PDF, scanned, or even plain text tabs.
GuitarToolkit is an awesome app for a library of chords, scales, and arpeggios.

Netflix is getting more content in Canada now and I think is probably worth the 8 bucks a month, just be careful of ISP bandwidth caps.
IMDb - Great app to have if you've ever had a conversation that said "who was that guy in that movie?"
Google Earth is always fun.
TWC MAX+ is my favorite weather app.
Star Walk is a very cool "augmented reality" app that gives you an interactive map of the stars with a huge database of stars/galaxies/satellites.

A neat "picture of the day" app is The Guardian Eyewitness. It's from the UK's Guardian newspaper. So it's a news photograph, but they also give you a breakdown of how the shot is composed. It's great because you can learn photography concepts from it.
If you have any younger kids, especially girls, or really kids of any age at heart, the UZU app can be fun and mesmerizing. Real time multi-touch interaction with particle simulation. You kind of need to see it in motion to understand the appeal, but my niece goes straight to it on my iPad.

For photography/picture stuff:
Photoshop Express
Snapseed is quite good as well probably better than PS Express but PS Express is free.
Eye-Fi card for your camera. Taking a picture and having the image pop up on the iPad screen 3 seconds later can be invaluable for checking composition and focus. Not to mention being able to show people the picture on the screen and being able to take more while they look.

Games :
Lots of solitaire and mahjong apps.
Infinity Blade - Swordfighting rawr! Best graphics currently on the iPad I think.
World of Goo - not a porn simulator
Plant vs. Zombies - like crack for my wife. Her #1 ipod touch app.

Sorry for rambling but with the sheer number of apps available for the device it's always a time saver to have stuff recommended.

[BenoA]

Thanks Hellbat! Hours of fun above! For now I only checked out Zinio... Spent already too much time on it.