Are We Entering the Post PC Age?

Two years ago, I wrote about my iPad 1: For me, the iPad is the ideal machine when away from my desktop. E-mail, news, and Wikipedia via the internet are all at my fingertips. I have no time for watching films or playing games, but it seems that other people can well find their fill with the iPad.

When the iPad 2 hit the market a year ago, I considered the improvements marginal compared with what I already had. I decided two mediocre cameras didn't make much difference. Anyway, one of my habits is to skip one generation of gadgets, just as I jumped from the iPhone 3S to the 4S. 

I was among the first to get the newest iPad generation. As soon as the Apple website opened for preorders, I squeezed mine in. Like thousands of other people, I got my iPad delivered on Friday, March 16. The main reason I bought the new iPad wasn't its much-touted Retina display, but the faster processor, because some operations on my iPad 1 took pretty long.

Before giving you my impressions of the new iPad, I would like to demonstrate that even my first-generation machine fulfills most of the functions of a notebook, at least for me, and that instantaneously, without lengthy rebooting. My favorite applications are on my home screen below. They are available the moment I wake up my iPad.

For managing my appointments, tasks, and contacts, I use Pocket Informant, the application I have suffered so much over the last few years because it did not and does not easily synchronize with MS Outlook. In the meantime, the people at WebIS have included iOS calendars in Pocket Informant that also display in Outlook and stay synchronized in the Cloud. 

The next icon in the first row of applications is Mail, followed by a homemade icon named Wikipedia. Tapping it takes me directly to my Wikipedia watchlist to track changes to articles I have written or contributed to. On the other hand, my activity on Facebook (the next item) is limited to tracking my son's whereabouts.

The first application in the second row is Flipboard, that gorgeous newsreader. With Flipboard, I follow the most important national and international news. However, the app seems selective, so I switch to the slower and less shiny Pulp Reader to avoid missing specific information. 

Next come two browsers I chose from the good dozen available in the App Store in addition to the built-in Safari (last in the first row): Dolphin HD and Mercury. 

I switch to Dolphin whenever, for no apparent reason, Safari is unresponsive. Mercury is friendly, as it sports a right-hand scroll bar, making browsing longish websites a breeze. 

Last but not least, the Wikipanion app is unbeatable for looking things up. It lets you switch quickly between the German, English, and French versions of Wikipedia on the same topic.

Let us talk about text processing regarding the applications I placed in the third row. Forget about a Word-like treatment of texts on the iPad. Apple's Pages may perform wonders on a Mac but is useless for working on texts when your desktop runs Windows. Document files created in Pages on the iPad end up in obscure places like WebDIS, iDisk, and iCloud or are accessible on your desktop only via iTunes. 

There is Dropbox, the best invention for exchanging information between two machines since Microsoft's ActiveSync, which almost kept a Pocket PC in phase with a desktop PC. In Dropbox, you always work on the same file stored in the cloud from any machine that has access. No need for synchronization!. QuickOffice connects to Dropbox, and you can happily work on your MS doc or docx files on the iPad, but beware! Not all formatting done on the PC is kept when you make changes on the iPad and send your text back into the cloud. Fully justified text turns left-adjusted, which I still accept, but more serious is that all underlying information, like embedded links, is wholly lost in the transfer.

While dreaming about MS Office for the iPad (rumors circulated two months ago), I usually only need a simple text processor to jot down my ideas, load them into the cloud, and retrieve the text-only files on my desktop. 

Some text editors are available for the iPad, like iAwriter, Writeroom, Textwriter, and Plain Text; however, my favorite is Nebulous. It opens with an additional row of freely programmable keys. Here, I have direct access to umlauts, I find keys that let me move around in a text, and, last but not least, the row of keys has the sorely missed forward delete key.

 

The advanced Pons English dictionary is the next and most expensive item on the home screen. Although I often use LEO on the web, Pons is always available, even offline. 

PhatNotes is one of the most cherished carryovers from my Windows Mobile times. The database contains all my personal information and passwords. PhatNotes is an iPhone app optically blown up on the iPad and synchronizes data between iOS and Windows versions. In the meantime, I have transferred all my non-confidential information to Evernote (see the apps bar at the bottom), which will store anything. Evernote belongs to the ten apps everybody should have on their iPad/iPhone. 

The same is true for GoodReader. It lets you read, among other formats, PDF files in book format and annotate, cut, and paste the text. Remember my hailing of Google? On GoodReader, I read, e.g., those scanned-in books about the Baden Revolution of 1848/49 that some revolutionaries wrote and published shortly afterward in Switzerland, where they had found asylum.

The fourth row starts with my collection of weather apps. My favorite is Meteogram, but if its forecast does not please me, I switch to others. 

In Utilities, I have collected a couple of goodies like PCalc, a calculator featuring inverse Polish notation, a fast way of calculating as promoted by Hewlett-Packard in the 80s in their famous pocket calculator series. I therefore cherish an emulated nostalgic iHP41CV available for both the iPad and the iPhone. 

In addition, I placed apps for testing WLAN speed, the TapDictionary, and TextExpander in Utilities.

The last row on the home screen is completed with a self-explanatory SPORT1 app and the DB Navigator. The navigator allows me to plan German and European train trips and includes local urban transport connections to the nearest train station.

The apps bar at the bottom starts with Musik, containing most of my classical CD collection and a couple of jazz oldies and evergreens, although I prefer listening to them on my iPhone. 

Photo includes various photo apps I still have to sort out for their usefulness. I also keep a private photo collection, starting with the advent of digital picture-taking in 2000 and ordered by years. In addition, an album called nostalgia contains scanned photo souvenirs of yesteryear. I already mentioned Evernote, the database for collecting any information you want to keep and refer to later, and to synchronize with the PC. Erinnerungen (Reminders) I usually fill in on my iPhone, mainly with Siri's help. 

The last two items on the bottom bar are obvious and essential for those using Apple's iOS devices.

What are the most significant improvements of the new iPad compared with my iPad 1? The strain on my ol' blue eyes is much less when reading text on a Retina display. The increase in speed is dramatic. Launching Pocket Informant from scratch takes about 3 seconds on iPad 1; it takes less than a second on the new iPad.

The other day, I read an article that we are entering the post-PC age with the advent of the iPad. That is only partially true since the PC will remain my main workhorse for all significant office work, editing photos, creating web pages, and doing home banking. Just consider the monitor size. However, post-notebook age sounds acceptable to me.

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