by Richard Rotman
Professor of Public Relations, Humber College
PR Writer Extraordinaire
Part I
It arrived from China as scheduled but not on time. I had been tracking its journey from Shenzen to Anchorage, Alaska. It then flew to the FedEx hub in Memphis and on to Mississagua, ON, where it arrived at my home office at 2:00 pm. Sheldon, the FedEx delivery guy, said his station delivered 500 iPads and that he personally was responsible for 30. Sheldon added that often no one is home when he must obtain signatures. I asked if he knew what he was delivering and he said, “Yes, I do and everyone is home today.” Immediately sent my kids a photo of it out of the box.
Is it the future of computing?
As was once said about Bruce Springsteen and the future of rock ‘n’ roll, I have seen the dawn of something new in computing and it’s called iPad. I agree with The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg that the touch entry could take over the mouse, which has dominated computing since the Mac’s intro in 1984.
Why do I have one? Because I had the very first Mac the first week it came out and two Apple Newtons, the first ever PDA? Partially but I believe that this venture will ultimately mean more.
I spent much of the first and second days exploring and opening my eyes to how it works.
General observations:
- It is as good as the hype: seeing the high-resolution photos and fast processor at work is remarkable.
- Some things are so amazing they are freakish: turning the pages in the Apple library and seeing how they wrinkle and can be partially turned is almost too dazzling. It comes with a copy of Winnie the Pooh, one of my old favorites; it almost makes me want to read it again.
- The Kindle app from Amazon simply moves the pages forward with a finger. I downloaded a chapter from Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists, a journalism novel, and read it in bed at night. I wanted to read the third book in the Dragon Tattoo series but Amazon said it wasn’t available in Canada. Boo!
Apart from participating in the technology, my main purpose in getting an iPad was two-fold: read media online and eliminate paper; read books and reduce paper. On both those counts, it does appear to work as promised. As I cancelled my newspaper subscriptions, this is important.
App review:
- New York Times: great but not enough stories; still need the online version. No doubt I will be paying for the iPad version soon.
- Globe and Mail: Haven’t worked out the paid app but the one for Blackberry/iPhone is a masterpiece and it works on the iPad.
- Guardian Eyewitness (all photos) and BBC, both wonderful.
- Best app so far: Instapaper: This killer app repurposes web articles by eliminating ads, graphics and links and then turning the entire article into a news story with a headline and saving it for later reference.
Part II: people’s reactions, Apple’s Pages and Notepad.
Tags: Blogs, Editing, good writing, iPad, Public Relations, social media, Writing
