Apple iPad: good for business as well as pleasure?

This month, I’m writing a column on the Apple iPad – literally: I’m trying to write all 2,800 or so words on one and I’ll let you know by the end of this article whether I made it.

You’re probably wondering why on earth I’d do this – surely the iPad is just a rich kid’s toy, a coffee-table gadget for gaming and the odd bit of web surfing, and this column is supposed to be about business tools?

I’m not sure whether this is simply excess demand or whether Apple has found some legal way around the anti-price-fixing regulations

That’s what I thought when it was launched, but then I started to encounter people using it for business. First were a couple of technical journo colleagues who started packing iPads rather than laptops for trips to the US. Then I started receiving emails from PC Pro readers about using iPads for business – some think it’s the ideal device for meeting notes, others for showing clients designs (it’s better than a projector or large monitor: clients seem to appreciate the work more when they can hold it themselves). I’ve also started to see iPads among train commuters, and even spotted a couple in some of my clients’ offices. I just had to test whether my preconceived prejudice against the iPad was wrong.

Let’s start with the purchasing process, and which model to buy. The iPad comes in six configurations, three memory sizes (16, 32 or 64GB), and with either Wi-Fi only or Wi-Fi+3G. It would have been sensible to buy the 16 or 32GB (plenty of space unless you’re toting loads of movies) and Wi-Fi-only version because I’m going to use it mostly in my office or at home, and when I do venture outside I can use a PAYG MiFi dongle from 3, an inexpensive way to grab a 3G signal and feed it to a Wi-Fi-only device. But of course, I’m a gadget fan: I wanted the top-of-the-range 64GB model with 3G too, which costs £699 from an official Apple store.

I’m pretty good at sniffing out bargains, however, so I went off to see what deals I could find. But apart from a couple of no-name vendors, I’d never heard of selling US import devices for about £15 off – almost everyone else was selling them at the full £699 RRP.

I’m not sure whether this is simply excess demand or whether Apple has found some legal way around the anti-price-fixing regulations. My hunch is the former, because not only is everyone selling at RRP, they’re also refusing to accept money-off voucher codes for iPad sales: I became really bored of finding “£50 off over £500” coupons only to read “excludes iPad” in the small print. In the end, the best I could manage was 3% cashback via Quidco, on a reserve-and-collect purchase from my local PC World. Oh well, £17 is better than nothing.

What did surprise me was how eBay is full of people offering iPads for way over list price, sometimes at a premium of £150 or more. I don’t think many of them are actually selling, but it’s a sure sign that the iPad is still a hot item.

In the box

So having procured my device, what’s it like to use? Well, the initial experience is very Apple indeed: the packaging is minimal, but not as minimal as the user manual. I say “manual” but it’s actually a piece of thin card, with a picture on one side showing where the buttons are and details of where to download iTunes on the other. If you’ve ever used an iPhone, though, you’ll feel at home. The notable differences are that the iPad still runs version 3 of Apple’s phone OS, so there’s no multitasking or folder support and, unless you download something such as Truphone, you can’t make voicecalls since its SIM card is for data only.

And that SIM card is interesting. Like the iPhone 4 it employs a micro-SIM, which is much smaller than a traditional mobile phone SIM. Most iPad shops will try to sell you a new data contract for your device – the bloke at PC World actually tried to sell me data, insurance, a case, and an off-device backup solution. However, if you have an old data-enabled SIM laying around, perhaps one that you use for occasional PAYG calls, you can trim it down to work in the iPad because the electrical connections are physically in the same place, and the parts you cut away don’t contain anything electronic.

It’s possible to cut down a SIM to micro-SIM size using nothing more than a sturdy pair of scissors (I’ve done a couple without any problem), but a safer bet is to head off to eBay where for about £10 you can pick up a micro-SIM cutter. These look a bit like staplers, and punch a nicely formed micro-SIM out of a normal SIM. These tools often come bundled with a couple of adapters, so you can continue to use this circumcised SIM in your normal phone.

Considering its huge screen, the iPad achieves phenomenal battery life: a couple of hours’ worth of intensive game playing, especially Wi-Fi-connected games, will completely kill the battery of most popular smartphones, but the same session on a fully charged iPad will probably leave the charge level at around 75%.

This accounts for the heavier-than-you’d-expect weight of the device – the back of it is crammed full of battery. But this big battery needs a big charge to keep it topped up, and the USB ports fitted on many PCs aren’t man enough for this job, so when you plug in your iPad you’ll see a “Not Charging” message at the top of the screen. Actually, I think it’s fibbing and it does charge, very slowly (especially when the screen is off). However, some recent PCs and many Macs now come with macho USB ports that can pump out the full current required by the iPad.

The supplied charger is interesting since it looks exactly the same as the charger supplied with earlier iPhones, but if you look carefully at the label you’ll see the iPad charger says 10W. iPhone-owning iPad users will need to be very careful not to get these two otherwise identical-looking chargers mixed up (actually, you can safely plug an iPhone charger into an iPad – it just takes a lot longer to charge).

And while we’re on the subject of Apple chargers, can I just mention that the newer iPhone chargers, as supplied with iPhone 4, are beautifully designed, and it’s nice to see one that’s UK-specific, rather than some bog-standard worldwide effort with bodged connecting pins? Perhaps if we asked Apple nicely it might start to put as much effort into the earphones it supplies with the iPhone, the current version of which are frankly awful.

But back to the new charger: for those who haven’t seen it, it looks like a very slim, normal UK mains plug, but with a USB socket where the cord would normally emerge, all the circuitry being contained within its slim triangular body. Mere words can’t really do it justice (although perhaps raving over a charger design is a sign of unhealthy obsessive tendencies).

Sick squid

So what’s it actually like to use an iPad for business tasks? Can it really replace a laptop for travelling-light journeys? Well, out of the box it comes with a few things that a business user might need: a pretty good email client (which supports push notification when connected to an Exchange Server) and a fairly good web browser. My only real reservation is its lack of Flash support (although unless you work in the creative industries that probably won’t be a huge problem).

The Contacts and Calendar apps both sync wirelessly with Exchange and are more than usable, and typically for Apple not only do they work well but they look nice too. There’s also a Notes app, although that doesn’t sync with Exchange Notes, and a native Google Maps client, although this is somewhat superfluous as the web version works – and, in some ways, works better.

What’s missing – as indeed it would be from a newly purchased Windows laptop – is an office suite, containing word processor, spreadsheet and presentation software. These all have to be downloaded from the App Store, where Apple has its own offerings based on its Macintosh iWork suite. Available for the iPad are Pages, Numbers and Keynote, and I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out which are the PowerPoint, Excel and Word equivalents. Each costs £5.99 – not at all unreasonable – and works elegantly on the iPad platform.

In my attempt to write this column on the iPad, Pages was my first port of call, but I only got as far as the first couple of paragraphs. The big problem for me is that it has no word count, which I simply couldn’t believe at first: how can any modern word processor expect to be taken seriously without a word count? It’s an especially important facility for anyone who bangs out words for a living, but even people who only turn to a word processor occasionally still need to see how much they wrote (I’d bet that Apple’s own job application form has a “Tell us about yourself in no more than 200 words” box). This omission from the iPad version of Pages is bonkers.

Despite my love for the prettiness of Pages, and indeed for most of its functionality, it had to be binned

There are ways around it: someone has created an app that you use in conjunction with Pages, by copying the text from Pages, switching to the other app, then pasting in the text to count its words. Sorry, but that’s far too much faffing. Another is an email-based service, where you send a document from the iPad to a special address and receive an email back specifying the word count. Again, far too much trouble.

So, despite my love for the prettiness of Pages, and indeed for most of its functionality, it had to be binned. Ah well, I’d only wasted £6. I ended up switching to Documents To Go, a package I’ve used on various PDAs and mobile phones in the past. It’s not as good-looking as Pages and perhaps not quite so well integrated into the iPad OS, but it’s functional and, more importantly, it has a fully working word count facility available, just one click away from the main editing screen.

There are two versions available: Office Suite for £5.99 can read and edit Word and Excel files but only read PowerPoint, while the version costing £8.99 also allows you to edit PowerPoint documents, plus it has support for saving to cloud storage systems such as SugarSync and Dropbox. There are a handful of specialist writing apps available too, but I tried a couple and found them both a bit lacking – I’m coming to the conclusion that office software works best when it has a few versions’ worth of history behind it, and when it comes from some largish vendor rather than a lone “bedsit” developer.

So what is it like typing a whole column using the iPad’s keyboard? Let’s start with its onscreen keyboard, which, much as with any other touchscreen smartphone, involves pressing pictures of keys presented on the glass screen below your document. As with the iPhone there’s no tactile feedback, but the iPad’s keyboard is obviously quite a lot wider. In fact, you have a choice of two different widths, since the device can be operated in both portrait and landscape mode. Although it might sound illogical at first, I found I was more productive using the narrower keyboard you get when holding the device in an upright manner.

Perhaps this is partly because I’m used to smartphone keyboards and ultraportable laptops, so I’ve grown accustomed to a narrow key spacing, but I also found that the wider landscape keyboard obscured too much of the screen.

The iPad uses the same auto-correction system for typing that you’ll find on the iPhone, which has been very well received on the smaller device, and people have marvelled at how it’s able to turn a set of fairly inaccurate key prods into intelligible text. The problem I found on the iPad was the keys are large enough that I rarely made mistakes, but the correction system kept coming across words it didn’t know and replacing them with what it thought I might have meant. Since it replaces each word with a perfectly valid English word, there’s no squiggly red line that you’d normally see beneath a typo or unusual word, and as a result you need to proofread your text very carefully, looking for such wrongly substituted words. Or else you can do what I did and switch off auto-correction.

I also tried one of Apple’s external keyboards. There are two models on offer, one combined with a dock (so it will charge the iPad when you use it), while the other operates via Bluetooth. I bought the docking version but soon realised that was a mistake, since it operates at a fixed angle and you can use the device only in portrait mode – I now wish I’d bought the wireless version. Mine is a nice enough keyboard, though, and very similar to typing on a Sony VAIO.

Did I succeed?

So, did I manage to type this whole column, sort out all the pictures, and email the bundle to Dick Pountain, all on the iPad? Well, actually, no. I got about 1,200 words in to the column and decided that if I was going to hit my copy deadline (or at least not stray more than my usual few days past it), I was going to have to switch to a proper keyboard on a real PC.

But that doesn’t mean the result of my experiment is a humiliating defeat for Apple’s device. At least part of the reason I switched back to a PC is that I’m far more familiar with the proper keyboard and Microsoft Word combination that I’m using as I type this final half of the column: years of experience count for a lot when deadlines approach!

I’m sitting here thinking that anyone would be mad to type anything longer than three or four paragraphs on an iPad, but at the same time I realise that several famous authors either still hand-write their manuscripts with a Biro, or else use mechanical typewriters, churning out huge volumes with old-fashioned and awkward technologies.

So perhaps there’s hope for the iPad yet. In fact, there’s a lot of hope for the iPad: it’s a great tool, either as a pure entertainment device or as a business tool – or more likely something that spans the divide. Since I bought mine it’s been sitting on the coffee table, and I reach for it whenever there’s an email to check, an argument that Google or IMDB might settle, or just for whiling a few minutes away flicking a few Angry Birds. I love it!