Last weekend I planned a three-day weekend trip to the west coast, and for the first time, I didn’t write and schedule blog posts in advance. I made the decision to write my daily blog entries for Fluent Every Year from the road, on my iPad.
There were a few daunting parameters to this experiment. It meant accepting the iPad’s onscreen keyboard as my only input device, and it also meant depending on WiFi access to be available, since I do not have a 3G version.
The first thing I found was that WiFi is not as ubiquitous as I like to believe. I stayed in a different hotel each night, and only one actually made WiFi available in the room. The other two offered wired internet service in the room, and one had wireless available only in the lobby, and only for a daily rate of $13.
I learned that one simply can not expect to use their iPad everywhere they go, even if the hotel promises internet access. If you expect to have a reliable connection, you’ll need to pack an access point, or else expect to be hunting around for a coffee shop.
For sake of convenience I decided to write my blog posts in the hotel using the Notes app, and then find a coffee shop with internet access and just copy-paste the content into WordPress. That was fine for the most part, but there was another problem which wasn’t so easily worked around: the keyboard.
Any significant amount of typing becomes a terrible burden with the iPad’s on-screen keyboard. It’s horrible even for short messages on Twitter… but for a blog post which typically lands between 600-1000 words, it’s terrible. Painful. Completely unrealistic.
Even worse, the keystroke combinations required to form HTML tags on an iPad are rage-inducing. To make a link, press [123], then [#+=], then <, then [ABC], then a href, then [#+=], then ", then hopefully you’re pasting the URL, then ", then [123], then [#+=], and >, and now you’ve opened the tag…. you still have to close it later.
When I returned home, the first thing I did was test it out with my bluetooth aluminum keyboard, which works like a charm. Next time I travel out of town, I’ll pack the wireless keyboard with the iPad. I expect that will be far more acceptable — especially with HTML!
I’m also going to look around at MicroCenter and/or Best Buy and see if I can manage to find a small wireless access point which doesn’t require a bunch of cables and a big power brick. It would be nice to know I can rely on internet service at the hotel.
However, it should be noted that the small, lightweight iPad is not a bother to carry to a coffee shop. In a situation like mine, I could easily type up my blog post in Notes using a keyboard, and then carry the iPad to a coffee shop and paste it into WordPress. Unlike a larger, heavier laptop with a short battery life and big power cord, carrying the iPad is like carrying a small book or magazine.
And that highlights one enormous advantage for the iPad — it’s size. My flight was much more enjoyable than they have typically been in the past, because I was able to watch movies comfortably on my flight with a very viewable 10-inch screen. In stark contrast, the guy next to me on my flight out was squinting at a movie on his iPhone, and the guy next to me on the flight back was cramped and precariously bending his arms to operate his laptop in the tight conditions of economy seating.
Furthermore, the ability to carry several movies, dozens of books, access to the internet, and a usable (if frustrating) blogging tool all in such a small package is a huge win for a traveler. And for the majority of people, the keyboard shouldn’t be a big deal, since there aren’t a ton of people writing long blog posts on a daily basis.
But even for me, I think packing my bluetooth keyboard along with my iPad is still a huge improvement over carrying a laptop, so in spite of my two severe complaints, I’m still convinced that this is a revolutionary device.
