Finally we have come to the last tablet, and possibly the be all end all to this tablet war, the Apple iPad. The Apple iPad was deemed the savior to many media industries and was looked forward to by photographers as a way to edit, and view your photos on the go. So is it really just a better way of presenting your portfolio?
Lots of photographers posted their thoughts on the product already. If you remember the posting a week or so that I did entitled The Apple iPad and The Blind Photographer, the big hit as a potential tool for photographers is the big 9.7 inch 1024 X 768 screen. This was an issue I was seeing with every other tablet aside from the HP Slate. Another pro about the iPad is that it has access to the App Store so like the HP Slate, which runs Windows 7, the iPad too has its own arsenal of applications at its disposal. People have said that the iPad is like an oversized iPod Touch. This means the iPad can do anything the iTouch can do, unfortunately however it also inherited some of the iTouch’s limitations.
There is no USB port and no SD card slot on the iPad itself but there is an adapter for your camera so you can upload photos directly to the iPad. In addition to this Aperture will be able to handle your RAW files from your camera however from my understanding it may just convert the files into a different format before they are brought over to the iPad. After that you can then go in and edit your photos. Afterward you can Flickr, Facebook, or upload them wherever your heart desires via the browser.
The iPad, I feel is a real game changer in the Tablet PC market because of the versatility of the device. This week we have looked at several Tablets and while some of their highs and lows, the iPad seems to be the tablet that takes in all those pros, with very few of the cons. The pros though I believe come from the idea of taking the iTouch, and a Mac computer and combining them. The reason why I saw this is because you can’t use Aperture on an iTouch or iPhone, but then again you really wouldn’t see some of the apps on a Mac that you would on a iTouch or iPhone.
Another thing: going back to the other Tablet PCs we have looked at this week, the screen size is a big thing, especially for the visually impaired photographers. Yes, you would expect a Tablet PC to be small and portable. But we need screens the size of the iPad because detail is important to photographers and their imagery, it also it just makes the job easier for Blind Photographers.
The only thing that the iPad has to rival it really is the HP Slate. However I won’t go into that until Monday when I do a final round up of all the tablets from the week and figure out which tablet truly is the best for photographers.