Upon opening up the iPad box, I expected it to contain a little more in the way of documentation - the mac at least contains a brief overview of the features. With the iPad, it's even less - just an image identifying the various connection ports. This was enough for me to identity the on/off button and upon pressing it, an image directed me to connect it to my machine and open iTunes.
So far so good - I went through a few formalities in terms of license agreements before being presented with the iPad home screen. Having never used an iPad or iPhone before, it took me a few minutes to get up to speed with how to navigate anything. After configuring it to connect to my router, I had Internet access up in a breeze and was happily browsing away.
Next I thought I'd try out something a bit more tricky - playing an avi video. On my mac, I use VLC for playing back all of my video formats. Luckily, there is a VLC app for iPad and after installing it from the app store, I had my first - "ok - what now?" moment. How to transfer files to the iPad. A google search explained that the files are transfers through iTunes via the 'app' tab, and are associated with a particular app. It sounded simple enough transferring files was simple. Although I am still curious as to what happens if you have two apps capable of opening the same file - does it mean you need to have two copies of the file - one for each app?
The interface to VLC is very slick and simple. Everything was going fine until it hung. My first solution was to restart VLC which didn't work, so I resorted to restarting the iPad. While this resolved the problem, it meant restarting it each time VLC hung. There must be another way and luckily there is - a bit of googling reveled the following solution:
- Tap the playing area to display the VLC controls
- Tap the 'forward' control twice
- Tap 'done'
- The VLC media selection screen should be displayed
- Select the video to play and it should continue from where it hung
