iPad Review: From the Perspective of a College Student

Thinking about getting an iPad?  It certainly is a tempting gadget, with a beautiful 9.7 inch multitouch display and a familiar iPhone operating system. But does the feature set and potential of the device make it a good option for college students?

The main thing one has to realize before getting an iPad is that it was designed for consumption, not productivity.  It's a device that you watch movies on, browse the web and play games with.  It wasn't made to write papers or edit photos and videos.

First off, if you want to use an iPad to take class notes with, you're going to want to get a keyboard.  Although the on-screen keyboard is spacious it can get very distracting during fast-paced lectures.  Other options include the keyboard dock, which requires you to put the iPad in an awkward portrait position, or you could also use any bluetooth keyboard which might be a more versatile option (giving you the ability to use the keyboard on other computers).

I was able to type just as fast using the on-screen keyboard as I was using my normal laptop, however since the keyboard is touch, you need to constantly look at the screen while typing.  Also, if you have a note-instesive lecture, typing on-screen will become a hassle after about 40 minutes.  For light note-taking or simple text entry the screen keyboard is more than capable, but for anything else, you'll want to use a real keyboard.

Pages, Apple's version of Microsoft Word is a decent word processor that allows you to edit or write papers, and only costs $10.  There are also more intriguing options, like Evernote (free) which lets you simultaneously take notes AND record the audio of the lecture.  Just make sure to sit in the front row to capture decent audio.  

I wouldn't recommend writing papers on the iPad unless it's a simple response paper that doesn't require sources or citations.  The lack of multitasking (which is coming in a Fall update) really keeps the iPad from allowing you to write serious papers unless you want to switch back and forth between Pages and Safari, which would take about 5-10 seconds each time.  It doesn't theoretically seem like it's that much of a hassle, but it would get really really annoying extremely quickly if you're writing a long research paper.

If you have classes that require you to read a lot of PDF documents, there is an app called iannotation ($6.99) that lets you upload your pdf files from your computer and then annotate/highlight/type/draw on  the document.  It makes reading and taking notes fun, and saves a lot of paper in the process.  I found this app to be the one of the few things where the iPad flat out beats the experience you would get on any Mac or PC.  It feels natural to read and flick through pages and then highlight or annotate when necessary.

Reading books on the iPad is also a great experience.  Some people might say that your eyes will fatigue from looking at a LED screen for hours, but college students are already used to looking at a monitor for several hours a day.  iBooks is fun to use, and if you find any books in the epub format, all you need to do it open the file on itunes and it will sync to iBooks on the iPad.  You'll be surprised how many of the older (and even some of the newer) books on your syllabus are hidden on websites across the web at no cost, waiting to be read on an iPad or Kindle.

Unfortunately, we don't know when or if actual textbooks will be coming to the iPad.  If they do indeed come, and are marked down 40-50% from the retail price, the iPad could become a truly revolutionary device for college students.  You could have thousands of pages of your textbooks in a 1.5 pound device.  Apple would be silly not to encourage publishers to make their textbooks available for the iPad.  It works out for the publishers too: iPad textbooks would help to marginalize the second-hand textbook market and increase their revenue stream, even if they lower the prices of the books.  It's a win-win for both students and publishers.  

The iPad excels in terms of web browsing, listening to music, and watching videos.  The iPad will be a much more capable device in the Fall once it gets multitasking, so you can switch between a Netflix movie and the imdb app, for example, without the movie and app restarting every time you switch between the two.

Overall, I can't recommend the iPad to college students right now.  We will have to wait and see how exactly Apple implements multitasking for the iPad, since in all likelihood it might be more intuitive than the multitasking set to appear on the iPhone.

The iPad is really all about potential.  If Apple gets textbook publishers on board, manages to incorporate a good implementation of multitasking, and if more useful productivity apps are created (google docs editing & annotating iBooks immediately come to mind) the iPad will become an essential gadget for any college student.  The more features the iPad gets, the closer and closer it will come to replacing computers.  The iPad could very well be the future of personal computing.