Oliver Knill freut sich in Boston am neuen "Werkzeug"

3. April, 2010. The ipad has arrived

List of applications in an educational setup:

• Good reader. Nice to orgnize PDF's, for example from the web or uploaded from the computer via sftp.
• The apple ibook application is gorgeous, but one can not add own PDF's. Kindle and Stanza are not yet updated.
• Space time. A decent computer algebra system. A bit pricy but not bad. I would prefer to have a local Mathematica application (Wolfram Alpha like Google docs is for me not an option).
• Ebooks like the Grimm's ferry tales with embedded videos show what is possible in an educational setup.

I think Pogue is wrong with the classification of people who hate or love the ipad. According to his test (Do you use linux? Do you use bittorrent?), I'm a "techie". But I love the innovation of the ipad. Would I like to run any application on the device or rsync my files with it? Hell, yes. But thats not the point. It will take open source many years to come up with something close, certainly also due to patent reasons. Eventually, it will come, but for now, I need a device on which I can keep my thousands of books and articles. Buy two text books and you are in the prize range of an iPad and each book is 10 times heavier. For me, the iPad is a display tool. Like with a display for a computer, or with a phone, I do not have openness expectations there, I insist on open source where I organize my files and where I really work. For ipads, I could even use several. Like when working with several books at once, or having several computer displays, I can imagine having several of these tablets lying around in the house.