After too many conferences where my options for staying in the loop with my team were (1) lug a laptop around all day, including powerpack, etc or (2) receive/type emails on a phone keyboard while not being able to get to all of my filed emails (probably solvable with better software), decided to go for the iPad. Then the choice became: Wi-Fi only or Wi-Fi + 3G? There’s a reasonably significant price difference between them, and of course the 3G requires a service plan with a carrier, which usually goes against my cheapskate side. But this time had a bit of extra cash at my disposal, so decided to go for the gusto. Because the iPad isn’t subsidized by any of the carriers in the same way a phone might be, there’s not the same requirement to lock-in to a contract. In other words, pay a bit more for the ability to do 3G, but not locked in to paying month over month necessarily. OK, workable.
Next choice: which carrier (AT&T or Verizon) – you have to determine which when you buy your iPad. Just like phones (grumble, grumble), the equipment varies based on which carrier you’re going with. Having an existing contract with T-Mobile (being bought by AT&T) and not being entirely happy with that (lots of dropped calls lately), decided to test out Verizon.
Next choice: how much space – options include 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB. I don’t intend to use this as a heavy entertainment platform, so opted to go for the 32. Probably still more than I need.
Next choice: I was at Best Buy, so they wanted to set me up with a Geek Squad policy. Listened to what they covered, listened to the price ($120), opted to pass.
Out of box experience: you get the thing, it has a 2×2 inch instruction sheet that tells almost nothing. You turn on the iPad, and it shows two icons with a line between them. The first is a drawing of the connector for the iPad with a line connecting to an icon for iTunes. Really? They’re really counting on knowledge of iTunes being ubiquitous for their customer base. I didn’t have iTunes on my work laptop (I’m a Pandora fan, and usually listen on my phone rather than eat network bandwidth at work), so installed it.
Once it’s installed and started, with iPad plugged into my laptop, iTunes recognizes the iPad device and starts me up for registration. Looking forward to fun here – just really amused by the out-of-the-box experience.