Replacing a laptop with an iPad

Depending on who you talk to they say it’s entirely reasonable to replace a laptop with an iPad. But is that really the case?

Last week I went out of town for seven days and made the decision not to bring my MacBook Pro, perfect opportunity to put my iPad to the test.

First, I loaded up some additional software for my trip, since most of what I’d need access to would be work related things. The extra few apps I installed were:

• Gusto – HTML Editor with FTP publisher
• Pages – Word processor
• Office2 HD – Word processor capable of editing Google Doc files.

A major perk of taking the iPad was that I had 3G for part of my trip, and EDGE even in the boondocks where I was saying outside of Ludington, MI. Things were off to a good start.
On the second day of my trip after settling in, I went into town to find a coffee shop with WiFi since my EDGE was a little too slow for anything other than checking my email. Naturally in a tourist town I was able to quickly locate a nice bistro / cafe / coffee shop and pay a ridiculous premium for a latte, but I had WiFi (and caffeine). Things were still looking good.

After a short period of browsing the web and checking the stats of a few websites I settled in for some light work. Writing an article for Hijinks, simple enough. I fired up the WordPress app and set to work, only to find a complete lack of rich text and formatting options in the app… Ok… I can work with this… you can format things manually using HTML, but have you tried that on an iPad?  The result was this less than awesomely formatted article.

I also tried formatting the article in Pages just for giggles and copy and pasting it into the app as well as the web interface for WordPress. No luck.

Day five found a client leaving a panicked voicemail about their website throwing up some random PHP errors. Never fear, I fired up Gusto and connected to their server and downloaded the file in question and made the necessary changes to get things up and running again. While this worked alright, I really wish they’d add syntax highlighting to Gusto (it’s a planned feature according to the developers).

The only thing that really worked flawlessly was remotely restarting one of my servers.

I realize that a lot of this would’ve been made easier if I’d brought along my bluetooth keyboard, but that kind of defeats the purpose of the iPad in my mind. Bottom line, the iPad is still a fantastic solution for those who like browsing the web, playing games and doing a limited amount of work, but nothing beats the raw power and versatility of a laptop.