IPad Gripe Session | Hacker News Reader

IPad Gripe Session

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>Whether we’ll ever type as much on the iPad as on a PC, it seems obvious to me that some refinement is needed in managing how ‘touchable’ the iPad’s screen is while entering text.

Odd. I don't find this at all. I type a great deal in the Notes application and I find I'm nearly as fast on the screen as a real keyboard. Of course this is only possible because the iPad manages to correct most of my "fingers walking all over the screen" mistakes. I really didn't expect it to be as good as it has been and figured the lack of typing feedback would be a huge problem.

I hate to just say "me too", but, me too.

I've found I can really crank along on my iPads keyboard (in landscape mode) and can touch-type almost as efficiently as on a real keyboard. Overall I'd probably say I have no realistic complaints or suggestions in regards to the iPad soft keyboard.

The portrait mode is a touch cramped, IMO, but still very usable.

Yea, I should have mentioned that this is only the case in landscape. I don't bother trying with portrait, it's definitely too cramped as you say.

This passage really puzzles me:

As a gesture to invoke the Undo command, shaking a handheld device the size of an iPhone is clever and workable. Shaking a much larger device like the iPad is awkward at best

My iPad has an undo button on the keyboard (and even a redo one) and shaking it produces no result. Either our two iPads are different, which I don't think, or that's just a statement that the author did not bother to verify.

Shaking my iPad side to side quite vigorously does bring up an "Undo Typing" dialog box.

I would never do this though - you seem to have to do it pretty quickly, much easier to just hit the "undo" button.

What’s not great is mobile Safari’s penchant for refreshing a browser window nearly every time I return to it, regardless of how long the window has been idle.

This is my biggest and perhaps only gripe about the iPad. It doesn't have enough memory. My old iPhone 3g did the same thing, especially right before I got the iPhone 4 because the system software had gotten bloated in the last couple of years. Screen size doesn't help with this issue.

Apple either needs to spend some storage space on swap, or implement some kind of caching mechanism within mobile safari itself. The limited memory makes tabbed browsing incredibly frustrating, so much so that I use my iPhone 4 instead of the iPad most of the time now. I don't want to wait for a page load every time I switch tabs, especially over 3g.

The next gen iPad should ship with at least 1GB of ram, there is plenty of space in the case and ram is dirt cheap.

Edit: Looks like some people have already enabled paging by jailbreaking (http://www.ipodtouchfans.com/forums/showthread.php?t=288228). Apparently, iOS4 is going to enable paging across the board.

The next gen iPad should ship with at least 1GB of ram, there is plenty of space in the case and ram is dirt cheap.

Keep in mind that space and price are not the only constraints when it comes to RAM. Quadrupling the RAM amounts will also quadruple the power requirements for RAM and will directly impact battery life, which is one of the iPad's greatest features.

Does RAM actually take that much power? I'm curious because when battery life for mobile devices is discussed, usually back-lighting and CPU are the only thing anyone talks about.

Isn't the iPad/iPhone RAM integrated into the CPU/SoC package? Not quite as easy to increase the size of that while maintaining the same power consumption.

Try the Mercury browser app. I'm not sure why it would be the case, but their tab implementation seems much less eager to reload tabs.

I tried it, and it is much better. Thanks for the heads up.

I'm thoroughly annoyed by Safari refreshing tabs randomly, too. But I always assume its because of memory restrictions, and that this content has been evicted from memory to make room for web pages that I open in new tabs.

Memory is the root cause but it's more like they didn't implement a paging virtual memory system in the original iPhone os until iOS4 which allows for the persistance.

I use the ipad primarily for browsing, but i miss the aggressive word wrap features on the Droid. text doesn't wrap as well on the safari, forcing me to scroll left and right. they should definitely fix that.

I agree with his first point in the article - it's hard not to have iOS4 loaded up.

When they launch the iTV are they going to have three different devices with three different system cycles to support?

If history is any indication, by the next OS update (4.2 or 5) they will be merged. Apple seems to prefer to keep its horses decoupled: technologies percolate more slowly through its stack, but it allows them not to get stuck (so much).

For example with Longhorn MS tried to change the underlying kernel, the user interface, and to add some of those changes in its main programs too. Apple instead can take up to 2-3 iterations for a technology to become entrenched: first its developed in some niche application (e.g. Core Animation in iOS), then it gets generalised and turned into a general framework, and finally later its application groups (iLife, iWorks, etc...) start making use of it.

(note: I am not saying either system is the best. They both have pros and cons)

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