Lee Packham

This week I’ve been mostly stuck in hospital. I’ll say more when they know what’s actually wrong. Hopefully in time for tomorrow’s weekly update. However I wanted to post something up earlier about the use of IT during my stay and how things have changed, a lot!

The last time I was in a NHS hospital for any decent period of time was at 14. I was an emergency admission and ended up being in for nearly a week. This time, similar situation.

Geeks hate hospitals. Pure and simply, it is just sooooo boring! When I was 14 there was only dial up I internet in the UK so nothing in a hospital. If you were lucky enough to own a mobile phone, it would be an analog one. So no text messages, no mobile browsing. More to the point they were outright banned. Good thing too really, the old phones could actually stop a pacemaker!

So as a teenager there was nothing. A TV on the wall somewhere on the ward. That was analog too, so very poor picture indeed and small too. That would inevitably be stuck on BBC1 so nothing too exciting to watch either. So one would rely on visitors a lot more.

Fast forward to today. I’m writing this on my iPad which is using my Nexus One as a portable access point. I have my own flat screen tv and phone and sockets that nurses won’t kill you for plugging stuff into.

The tv and phone is provided using PatientLine. It claims to have internet too. However, with entirety of wards all playing farmville, my phone is faster. Although the TV is served using Sky, then picture is still served via analog. That sense odd to me, as digital would be cheaper to transmit. Especially as the analog would need more shielding in a medical environment,

One of the doctors asked me, “How is the iPad. Is it as good as they say?”. My answer was, “Its great when you are confined to a hospital bed”. It is.

Laptops are too cumbersome when you are in hospital. Doctors and nurses come and go. They are very pressed for time. The last thing they want to do is wait while you untangle yourself, put the machine to sleep and heave it somewhere safe.

No such hassle with the iPad. I just hit lock and put it down. I charge it while I sleep at night as the battery lasts pretty much all day. It’s also portable enough for me to move around the bed and still be able to read or write, as I’m doing now.

It’s not without fault though. Typing is still awkward. The amount of words I have to delete and rewrite, even as I write this post, is exceptionally frustrating. The main problem being that the modifier keys are just too big and so it’s easy to mistype.

The browser is great while immobile as well. Tapping on links is a lot easier to do than fiddling with a trackpad.

So what do I do with all this connectivity? I get to chat with people in the outside world! So MSN and Google Talk are very helpful. I can still reply to emails and do some basic bits of work. Some might argue I shouldn’t. I take the view that distraction therapy is one of the best!

Of course, I’d rather not be here at all. But that’s another story…

Too funny to ignore… that is all!

So magazines are flocking to the iPad with content. Great! Apart from the technical rag Wired, really hasn’t got a clue how to do it properly.

An app – that’s just pictures… of text. You can’t copy/paste and it takes up amazing amounts of space on your iPad. How irritating is that?

The post on Daring Fawnyball links this site that has screenshots of the “PNG slide show” so you can see just how bad it is.

Sorta glad I haven’t bothered with it. It really is surprising for Wired, who even had a Gopher site on the early days of the Internet. Very poor show. Very poor indeed.

Smart designer exports dumb pictures of text « Daring Fawnyball.

I was very weak yesterday and picked up my iPad. Only had to queue for 15 minutes in the Regent Street Apple Store to get my little 16GB one. I didn’t see the need for anything larger, as I didn’t want to put any of my music collection on it – and still don’t.

Do I think the iPad will take off? It really depends what you mean by “take off” to be honest. Will the mass market of iPod/iPhone fanbois pick it up like never before? Yes, they will. It’s not even open for a debate that one. Will techies find good uses for them? Yes they will. Will management bods love it, most likely.

But… what is it for? I think first off, I’d like to do a Good, Bad and Ugly look at things:

The Good

It is fast. Very fast. It makes the iPhone 3GS look like a ZX-81 speed wise. Seriously. To top it off, it does this with amazing battery life. I just can’t drain the thing! The display is exceptionally clear and readable. It has a very wide viewing angle as well – but then most displays do these days. eBook reading is amazing. The Kindle App from Amazon is better than the in built iBooks app though. Why? Simple for the highlighting and notes to be honest. The Dropbox app also makes for an exceptionally nice integration with files and the desktop and makes up for what’s missing…

The bad

There’s no decent file sharing between your desktop and the iPad. You can use the iTunes, but that user interface is exceptionally clunky and you’re stuck with something quite ugly to try and manage  them with.

For some reason (although I remember the complaints now), the wireless is atrocious and really needs fixing. I’m using an Apple Airport Network and getting really shoddy signals when my laptop and phone have full.

There’s no iDisk app – which is a shame. But then, there’s Dropbox.

The ugly

This is probably me not used to it yet… typing. It’s horrible. I just can’t find a comfortable position to sit with the thing to type. I went to Starbucks to take it out into a reasonable life usage scenario and found that I couldn’t get comfortable with the thing. When reading I could get comfortable quickly – just writing/typing on the thing.

It’s a lot easier to type on the iPhone by comparison. I would say that typing on the iPad is on par with the Nexus One from HTC/Google. It works – but my God it’s awful.

Video playback is also not as ‘great’ as advertised. I happen to have Star Trek from iTunes and it really doesn’t display as advertised:

Whereas – Sherlock Holmes:

So when you see all those pictures of Spock/Sylar – take note; they are using the Crop feature built into the video player to show the video full screen properly.

Now – what’s the iPad for? I’ll be honest, I’m still really working that out. It’s a nicely constructed tablet – I think, in typical Apple fashion, they pushed it early. It’ll probably be a lot better with iPhone OS 4, when Multi-tasking will appear. That’s slated for a September, 2010 release. Hopefully they won’t follow the trait they did with the iPod Touch and charge for it!

I’ve only had the thing for a day though. Maybe I’ll figure out the usage scenario that works for me with it – beyond developing that is.