06-17-2010 in Tightwad Tech by admin
In this episode Mark and Shawn give a thorough review of the iPad after Mark manages to get his hands on one in a very unlikely way.
The Tightwad Tech is a podcast by and for those in the education field who face ever-growing demands and ever-shrinking budgets. We discuss the strategic implementation of free and open source software as well as the creative deployment of hardware.
In this show, aimed at making desktop Linux approachable and understandable to the average computer enthusiast, a panel of Linux experts and Linux newbies discuss the the joys and pitfalls of Everyday Linux.
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I hope you've jailbroken it.
Two aspects of the iPad that you didn’t mention are the tablet form factor and the battery life (which I’m assuming is more than just a couple of hours). I know that Acer’s Aspire Timeline series of laptops are supposed to have really good battery life (for a laptop), and there are tablet PCs that you could get for the price of an iPad (with probably less-than-stellar battery life), but having both features in one device is appealing. Of course, the limited functionality of the iPad negates those benefits, because they are only secondary to accomplishing anything.
With regards to apps and their availability / openness, I like Mozilla’s model for their add-ons: there is a central repository run by the company in which submissions are thoroughly vetted, but if there’s another site offering an add-on you want, and the main site doesn’t have it, there’s nothing keeping you from downloading it from that third-party site. It’s similar to the major Linux distros; they have apps in repositories, and there are also third-party sites that you can freely download stuff from. That seems to be a happy medium between Apple’s model and, say, Microsoft’s model, not counting the software they sell — i.e. there is no Microsoft-run repository of [non-Microsoft] Windows apps.