Disruptive Proactivity

A day after my last iPad mumblings, here are some more.

In a lazy day yesterday, i downloaded and read a couple of short books that have been on the to-read pile for a while. O’Reilly have a nice programme where if you register books you’ve bought from them, they’ll sell you an ebook version for about £3 ($4.99 – use discount code MB499), which is a bargain. As they’re primarily a tech publisher, that’s easy fro them as they have a the ability to to that to their back catalogue. And they’re ok layouts, buts they’re clearly automatically done; not manually. And there are layout issues which will take time to be fixed as ideas and best practices evolve.
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I wandered along to the apple store before work on Friday, queued for half an hour, and wandered out with a 32Gb 3G iPad. 3G because, while I’m often near wifi, I’m away from it often enough that not having it is likely to be an issue at the time that it’s most useful. Orange do a no-contract pay-per-use SIM with £10 of free credit. So far, I’ve used none of it.

It took a few hours to get chance to open the box, and then I left it syncing while I went for lunch. It was still going when I got back, because the “re-encode high-bitrate songs to 128K” button was ticked, and hence it was reencoding about 1800 songs. Very, very slowly. Unticking it, and it went fast. The lovely thing about the iPad, as an iPhone owner, is that it picks up almost all the settings from my iPhone, if you tell it to use your iPhone config as the initial thing to restore from. Some of them are different enough that it does what it thinks is sensible, and you can tweak it later. Some you’ll prefer to change yourself.

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