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emellaich · 11-04-2010, 10:25 AM

I love the iPad for pdf's and use it for that purpose myself, but 100MB? I don't know about those. I would want some way to test it out before I spent the money. One of the compromises inherent in the iPad is that its RAM is fairly small (256MB, I believe?). I have never had any problems with this, but I don't know how it would cope with huge documents.

You mention the need to head out to wikipedia to pull in stuff. None of the choices mentioned in posts above really work the way that your PC does today. They don't multi-task so it's not as simple as running your pdf viewer and wikipedia in separate viewers. Perhaps the iPad today (11/4/2010) is the fastest with this and it may be that the upcoming iOS update (one to two weeks) which is intended to add multi-tasking will smooth the way here. On the other hand, you will still be crippled by one of the strange design decisions made by apple -- its applications all have a wall between them for file storage. This means its not easy to save a file in one app and access it in another app. You need to move it out to a pc or to dropbox or something in order to pull it into your new app.

On the subject of notion ink adam, I'm not too hopeful. The ipad's pdf prowess comes from the app store in the form of iannotate. My concern is that I don't believe android tablets (including the adam) will have much app support at launch. Furthermore, I don't believe that Adam is big enough to immediately drive a bunch of app developers to it.

I am a big Android fan, and I believe it holds more long term promise than the iPad. I suspect the future will look very similar to the smartphone market today. The iPad may be the biggest selling tablet (or among the biggest), but all of the Android tablets collectively will have more in total sales. This means that over the long run the app market for Android (and the notion ink tablet) will be as big or bigger than for the iPad. However, I think that is a 12 to 18 month statement. For the next several months I think you will find the early tablets will be limited in their software outside of the stuff inherited from smartphones and the built-in stuff like web browsing, calendaring, etc.

11-04-2010, 10:25 AM	#16
emellaich Wizard Posts: 1,101 Karma: 4388403 Join Date: Oct 2007 Device: Palm>Ebookman>IPaq>Axim>Cybook>Kndl2>IPAD>Kndl3SO>Voyager>Oasis	I love the iPad for pdf's and use it for that purpose myself, but 100MB? I don't know about those. I would want some way to test it out before I spent the money. One of the compromises inherent in the iPad is that its RAM is fairly small (256MB, I believe?). I have never had any problems with this, but I don't know how it would cope with huge documents. You mention the need to head out to wikipedia to pull in stuff. None of the choices mentioned in posts above really work the way that your PC does today. They don't multi-task so it's not as simple as running your pdf viewer and wikipedia in separate viewers. Perhaps the iPad today (11/4/2010) is the fastest with this and it may be that the upcoming iOS update (one to two weeks) which is intended to add multi-tasking will smooth the way here. On the other hand, you will still be crippled by one of the strange design decisions made by apple -- its applications all have a wall between them for file storage. This means its not easy to save a file in one app and access it in another app. You need to move it out to a pc or to dropbox or something in order to pull it into your new app. On the subject of notion ink adam, I'm not too hopeful. The ipad's pdf prowess comes from the app store in the form of iannotate. My concern is that I don't believe android tablets (including the adam) will have much app support at launch. Furthermore, I don't believe that Adam is big enough to immediately drive a bunch of app developers to it. I am a big Android fan, and I believe it holds more long term promise than the iPad. I suspect the future will look very similar to the smartphone market today. The iPad may be the biggest selling tablet (or among the biggest), but all of the Android tablets collectively will have more in total sales. This means that over the long run the app market for Android (and the notion ink tablet) will be as big or bigger than for the iPad. However, I think that is a 12 to 18 month statement. For the next several months I think you will find the early tablets will be limited in their software outside of the stuff inherited from smartphones and the built-in stuff like web browsing, calendaring, etc. Last edited by emellaich; 11-04-2010 at 10:28 AM.