One of my good clients called me the other day to talk about the Ipad, one of my favorite gadgets of all time. She wanted to kind of "justify" the purchase for a Christmas present to her husband, and wanted to know a little about how a design type person might use one. Now the first thing with Ipad you have to decide is 3G or plain wi-fi? Not a trivial question, as the 3G model costs about $130 extra. Now you may think, "I am only going to use this at home or where ever there is wi-fi" so why spend those extra bucks? And, if you want to use the 3G for data on the road, you will be paying about $25/month for the privilege. However, you can turn on and off the 3G data on a month to month basis, so when you are not traveling you can save those dollars.
The main reason to get the 3G is that the ipad will give you location information for the maps function. The maps on the Ipad are the best I have ever seen, and I am a map freak from way back. They use your location information to show where you are, like a giant GPS, but with so much more information. You can overlay traffic info, or satellite photo imagery, or just do a location search for any local business or landmark. You can have it draw routes for you, and you can view all those street view photos from google while you are traveling along (and the spouse is driving). For information while traveling it just cannot be beat.
But what about the business uses for Ipad? Remember my friend "Bill"? He got one (without the 3G, he is sorry about that now) to show potential clients a quick slide show of his scariest photos of buildings with long deferred maintenance. He can get it booted up in 30 seconds, and give the client 100 good reasons to hire him in 5 minutes or less. Try doing that with a laptop. For photo slide shows, they are just awesome. Sure you can do some of those things with a smart phone now, but the screen size is just not going to cut it.
Another business use is Autodesks sketchbook pro, a digital drawing program that you use with a small stylus to create ideas drawing freehand or with a grid on screen. I use it as an engineer to annotate photographs. You can load a jpg file into the program, then use the stylus to make notes onto the file, great for renovation projects when you are trying to convey your ideas for existing items to your CAD people. You can also use it when meeting with a client to sketch up quick ideas for approval. The touchscreen is way more intuitive than trying to use a laptop, and the sketch program only costs $10 or less.
I just downloaded a dictation program from Dragon for my Ipad the other day. It works amazingly well, no more "training" the program to your voice. And it was FREE. There are so many good apps out there for low or no cost, it never ceases to amaze me.
Now the ipad does not have a camera, or any usb ports. I do not see this as a big deal, as you can use a program like dropbox to access any files you may need while traveling. To get photos into the ipad's memory though, you need to load them through I tunes from another computer. All in all, the ipad is a great business tool, as well as being a lot of fun.
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