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Apple Hardware

iPad.

Well, I’ve just returned from a 10 day trip or so around Nord-Pas-de-Calais, France, and for once I didn’t take the laptop with me. Instead I brought my iPad along, and it served very well as a light-weight replacement ‘entertainment device’.

No programming at all, just consuming lots of different media, for which the iPad is more than up to it.

I watched a few movies on it using the Videos app, read a book using the Kindle iPad edition, and some comics on it via Comixology, and kept some spending figures in a spreadsheet using Numbers. I also used it a lot with Offmaps, an offline map reader for which I had downloaded the appropriate openstreetmap part of france before I left. It’s no match for a gps, but coupled with the GPS that is in the iPad it’s like map reading with the added ability of seeing where you are and zooming in and out of the map as you please. I really hate those small screens of the current gps devices, it’s so hard to get an overview of where you are going, with the iPad it’s just natural !

One thing I do miss is that I can’t download new pictures out of my camera like I do using the laptop with the SD Card reader although I believe there is a camera connection kit on the market.

The next few trips will also have an iPad as long as I don’t have to do any programming…