A week-end in the South of France using the Ipad

I enjoyed a long and sunny week-end in the south of France at a friend’s place (Gordes, Provence). I spent many hours near the swimming pool toying with the Ipad (the first Apple device I’ve ever bought).

I like the sexiness of the hardware but plenty of little things keep annoying me.

Intended home usage:

• read my RSS feeds
• browse Oreilly Safari
• read kindle books

I’m still looking for:

• A better browser, because Safari lacks some really obvious features such as tabs or page text search.
  • A1 Perfect browser: would be great if it didn’t reload the last page every time you switch back to it.
  • ICab Mobile
    • To be tried
• a RSS Feed reader that compares to Feedly. I use Feedly on the desktop but it does not exist on the Ipad yet so I looked for alternatives:
  • Feedler:
    • the experience is similar to Google Reader, hence functional but a bit boring.
  • Reeder: could not install
  • Early Edition:
    • Visually pleasant although not as much as feedly
    • Very slow to refresh
    • imports feeds from Google Reader but does not sync automatically.
    • No mark for later function
    • Doesn’t remember what you read.
    • Displays original posts with embedded browser instead of opening Safari (which a good thing).

Some random observations:

• You can’t see anything on the screen if you wear polarising sunglasses. :D Not a problem but it’s the first time I notice something like this on any device…. Update: (12/09/2010) When using polarised RayBan sunglasses, the IPad screen becomes invisible if you hold it in portrait mode. In landscape mode it’s fine.
• The absence of notice means you have to play around to discover some features of the hardware/OS/virtual keyboard, that’s actually quite fun.
• The WIFI issue
  • I observed that my Ipad loses the Wifi connection if the connection is unused for more than 5 minutes (does not occur at 4 minutes).
  • Router tweaks I tried with no success:
    • Disabled security
    • Changed the wireless channel
    • Switched down to 802.11b.
    • Used a static IP address
    • Updated the firmware of my Belkin F5D8635v1 from 1.00.17 to 1.00.23

Apps reviews:

Wired
PadGadget

Update: (07/08/2010)
Safari Books Online plans on releasing an app for the Ipad this summer.