Everyday Use Cases for the IPad

My pet iPad is a lot more useful than it has been purported to be. In the two weeks I’ve been using it, i have pretty much left my laptop home, and nothing has been sacrificed. It is definitely more difficult to blog, but I’m not TechCrunch and I don’t post multiple times a day. If I do, I can always use Posterous through email instead of WordPress. (You heard me correctly, Matt; WordPress for iPad isn’t perfect). For most of my life, the IPad has enhanced, rather than constrained, my productivity.

Things the iPad does better:

Feeds ( NewsRack $4.99) I’ve always hated the Google Reader interface, and have escaped to either Feedly or my6Sense. But they aren’t perfect either, because they are limited in their sharing capabilities and in their ability to deal with a large numbers of feeds I want to read on a daily basis. My daughter @chelseahardaway introduced me to NewsRack, which has the amazing capability to organize and save and share. Simple and clean, it let me cruise through 2600 unread items.

Documents. If your documents are online, GoDocs could be for you. It’s $3.99, but it’s a simple interface for Google Docs on the iPad. It alphabetizes your online docs, lets you see your folders, and makes it pretty, too. (I’m partial to good design.

Video Everyone has talked about this couch potato aspect of theiPad, but I didn’t get it until I found Justin.TV, whose iPad app allows me to stream MSNBC and CNBC live while I’m in the shower. This is where the iPad really shines, because it sits on my bathroom vanity, cordless and not dangerous, while I get ready in the morning. I used to have to either worry about getting my laptop wet, getting makeup in the keyboard, or racing out of the room dripping wet if something great was on the news.

GTD. For this I have used Evernote since it came out. All my passwords, my user names, account numbers, and essentials are on Evernote, and it was a godsend to find it so stable and useful on the iPad. It’s another one of those tools I can use for blogging in a pinch. I can also upload voice notes. Yes, I have a subscription that costs me $4.95 a month, but I was already paying that, so for me the app seems free.

Real Time News SkyGrid does this beautifully. It doesn’t seem to have caught on the way it should have, although it presents news almost in real time, and allows me both to search fast-rising streams (what is the world talking about) and search for my own interests. For now, SkyGrid is free, but I bet they come out with some kind of “Pro” account eventually.

Okay, so now I’m down to the ones everybody knows about: Kayak, the current best travel app, and Netflix, where you can stream video on demand on Sunday afternoon or Tuesday evening when you don’t feel like going anywhere and you want to see a movie. I also have a subscription to the Wall Street Journal, which I have had since it went online, so I’m ready that on the iPad. Although, if they raise the rates I might not.

So there’s plenty to do on the iPad, especially since it has the bright screen and the ten-hour battery life. And this is the first generation, which everyone knows is the beta. In the fall, when iPhone OS 4.0 comes out and this iPad won’t run it, I will probably replace this iPad with something more “finished.” But I will have had six months of fun in the mean time. At about $100 a month, the iPad cost me the equivalent of two dinners out.

Tagged as: GoDocs, iPad, Justin.tv, KAYAK, Netflix, NewsRack, SkyGrid