TechLahore

Tab switching on iPad's Safari browser is plain stupid... tabs reload even when they're not supposed to!

For those of you who are not fully up to speed with the plot, Jack, Kate, Sawyer and Hurley try to escape the Island in a stolen sailboat… no wait, that’s the wrong plot. We’re not talking about Lost here, we’re discussing the iPad! So, last week I told you about the iPad I bought and promised frequent updates on what my experiences using it were. Well, I have an update today. There are a number of things that are getting in my way and I keep reaching for my Laptop every time I stumble across one of these idiosyncracies – which are mostly artifical limitations, by the way.

To recap, my last post covered three gripes:

1) No front facing camera, hence no value as a handy Skype video phone
2) No Flash, hence most websites with interactive content don’t work
3) Not-so-sweet keyboard, including the mysterious case of the missing PgUp, PgDown, Home and End keys

Today, I’m adding to the list. Here’s the additional stuff I’ve discovered which I just gosh-darn hate!

1) Safari works oddly; when you switch tabs, it refreshes an already-loaded tab thus making you lose any text you might have typed in the text box, and generally making the entire experience slower than it needs to be. The darn tab is already fully loaded and rendered, why do you have to reload it? No obvious answer.

2) If Safari doesn’t understand a file, it won’t download it. Even if you have other apps on the iPad that might be able to make use of the file, too bad! They just won’t download. This includes archives… see 3 below.

3) There’s no way to download and view some of the most common attachment types in the Email app. For example, if you get a .zip or .rar attachment, too bad. There’s no way to decompress it and no way to view it. I even tried a third party app, but that requires a URL source for a .zip before it will download and view. And of course, I can’t provide a URL .zip source for an email attachment! This is a huge issue. I get a lot of attachments and many of them are large .zip files. Not good at all.

4) The iPad can’t charge off of a PC’s USB connection, like the iPhone and other mobile devices. I guess the reason is that the big batter on the iPad requires more current than what a standard USB port will deliver. But still, couldn’t they trickle charge it?

5) PDFs won’t directly open or import into the iBooks app. You have to go through a laborious and not-so-guaranteed process to convert PDFs into the Apple-adopted .epub format before the book will show up in iBooks. In order to do this, you have to download an app called Calibri on your PC or Mac. So getting a simple PDF to show up in iBooks requires a lot of extra effort and the use of a desktop/laptop computer!

6) No GPS. Therefore, Google maps and other location based apps are pretty hobbled. Apple did deliver a GPS chip on the iPhone 3GS but took a step backward with the iPad. I’ve tried determining location a number of times with the tower signal strength method the iPad uses and it’s pretty lame. You’re off by hundreds of meters typically.

I’m continuing to play around with the thing but I am running into a lot of these limitations. Definitely not a replacement for a Laptop! I’ll keep pottering about with my iPad and post frequent updates regarding my experience.

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