Everything was not expected.

One fine day I was travelling from Kuantan to KL. I took a flight. From KLIA I took ERL to KL Sentral. In the train, a mat saleh (white man or caucasian) sat before me. I was using my iPhone to read & reply email, also to read few PDF files. And then this guy took out his iPad, wrapped in a cool Apple’s leather case, attached a headphone, browsing some musics, then open a document to read. Wow! It was so cool man! Especially when you yourself were reading too but using that tiny iPhone screen.

I immediately put my ‘wow-iness’ as my Facebook status. And to my surprise, a friend, a close friend of mine, from my college days (in MRSM Terendak) offered me an iPad. She said she got it as a present for one month already & was not using it. What a pleasant surprise! I called her & the very next day I went to her office & collected the iPad. Thank you Natasha.

The iPad is a 64GB version without 3G. I reckon it is from Australia looking at the serial number.

I know nothing about iPad. But the first thing I did was to jailbreak it using jailbreakme.com. Then I realized that I need an internet connection to make iPad useable, else it will almost useless. So I jailbroke my iPhone (yup I JB my updated iPhone & succeeded in doing so), install MyWi & walla! I can now use the iPad connected to my Celcom 3G via my iPhone through WiFi tethering.

Since then I never look back. Reading articles is now extremely fun especially with Papers. Papers can manage all articles & can ‘match’ the PDF to get its metadata like authors, journal, date etc. I can sync my references between my iMac, iPad & iPhone. With Papers, I can annotate the PDF file I am reading. I was using iPad during a critical appraisal session with my students.

Reading & replying email is definitely better with iPad compared to iPhone due to its bigger & brilliant screen resolution.

I also installed iFiles to store & manage documents, especially the attachments from email. I also have iFile, without ‘s’ (from Cydia) of which I can access the root & whatever folder in the iPad if I want to via SSH from my iMac or Thinkpad.

Pocket Informant is a better GUI alternative than the built-in Calendar. But it can’t sync to my Windows Outlook directly. I have to rely on Google Calendar. So what I am doing is syncing my Outlook 2010 to Google Calendar, then I can sync Pocket Informant with it.

For word & spreadsheet, I bought QuickOffice Connect Mobile Suite that I like & I even have it in my iPhone. Its photo album also cool. Now I can show my portfolio in style! *grin*

For Facebook, I just use Facebook app for iPad & for twitter I prefer TweetDeck.

To sync documents between iPad, iMac & Thinkpad I use Dropbox (an online storage solution or cloud solution many people said). The first 2GB is free. Dropbox will automatically sync all the files between these computers/gadget.

iPad is one new experience with me. A good complement to the notebook that I have. But what I wish iPad can do is at least one USB port to transfer files & ability to print directly to a printer. Was thinking to use a wireless keyboard & mouse but I realize, iPad is not a notebook. It is not meant as serious working or business tool. But it surely complement it perfectly. How about using it as a presentation tool…..also super cool if its for few people. As for now I prefer my Thinkpad with Logitech Presenter.

Not…how to install Photoshop in the iPad..heh heh