The Flash internet
Your iPad comes with a browser and a connection to Apple’s AppStore. With both of these, you’ll easily find your way around the web, whether you’re browsing or sending messages to your friends.
Other web browsers are available for you to download, including Opera, Skyfire, Atomic, and Mercury. These all offer a slightly different experience, but in general they all lack one thing: support for the Adobe Flash platform.
One of the sour points in owning an iPad is that Apple doesn’t support Flash, which means you can’t properly view websites that use it. Now, Flash is an web format that’s widely used on a lot of sites, but Apple, too, is not without influence and the web is starting to sing to its tune, with many sites deploying videos and interactive elements in the new HTML 5 platform as a workaround.
On this count, a notebook proves is a slightly better option for browsing the web. Tablets running both Google’s Android and RIM’s BlackBerry operating systems can also view Flash, so these may prove to better web surfing solutions.
VERDICT: Both the netbook and notebook beat the iPad in this one, mostly because Apple won’t allow Flash to run on iOS.
Social networking
Social networking is also a popular activity, and one increasingly employed by businesses wanting to communicate with their customers. The AppStore has quite a lot of apps dedicated to the various social networking platforms, including Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
In some ways, these apps are better than using the browser-based options found on a regular computer, but many of these can also be downloaded to your computer and run separately from the browser, too.
VERDICT: Unless you like visiting the websites on a regular basis, we’re awarding this to the iPad. The AppStore has too many apps dedicated to social networking not to win this category.
No certainly not the ipad, an android device maybe.
I haven’t tried this on an Android tablet yet. I’ve only found a couple of things my iPad can’t do that my netbook could, such as editing code and uploading files to websites. And that Flash thing… that’s a little annoying. 🙂
I will browse on the ipad but multitasking is too painful, half the apps don’t push when they should.
Great for kids games though, shhh go play ipad, mummy is sleeping.
yes but how does it integrate with MS Office applications as most business people use these and would need to be able to open, view etc
yes but how does it integrate with MS Office applications as most business people use these and would need to be able to open, view etc
Office apps have the most problems, especially since Microsoft hasn’t actually given any tablet platform outside of Windows an official Office app.Â
There are a few options, but they all have formatting issues.Â
The number of grammatical errors in your article proves that it is not a good replacement.
For the office apps, it’s not just an iPad issue. Every app for tablets – iPad, Android, and BlackBerry – is going to have problems with spreadsheets and data analysis because often, the original apps don’t exist on the platform. So if completely accurate Excel files is what you’re after, you’ll want to go check out a Windows tablet.Â
If you use specialised software, it’s once again a platform issue. You can’t really throw blame at an iPad for that as it becomes an issue with the software and requiring a developer to make it for a platform.Â
Games: not sure how many modern games with high-end graphics you’ve tried to play on notebooks, but I’d chuck it to the iPad just on battery life alone. Sure, there isn’t a copy of Portal 2 or StarCraft II on the iPad (yet), but there are some excellent games available that use 3D engines and have solid gameplay. Furthermore, most of the laptops that sell for between 500 and 1000 – the iPad pricing area – will not have sufficient graphics power to play games decently.
Files: you’re right, transferring over email is a pain and DropBox or other cloud-based solutions are the best way, but the iPad was designed as a consumption device.Â
Netbook users have the most compelling reason to switch, and that’s not something I disagree with. If you need a full-fledged notebook, you need to have one and right now, based on what I’m seeing that’s coming out, that won’t be changing.Â
But that’s what the point of this article was: to see if an iPad could replace a laptop, and for some it can. I don’t really use my notebook all that much anymore, and for me, that’s a win. If I had to edit video, work on my graphics, and work in a development environment on the road, I’d switch back to it in a heartbeat.