Battery life
Laptops don’t generally get a whole lot out of the battery. Even when you ditch the DVD drive, switch to solid state, and build the battery into the notebook, the maximum runtime is normally around seven hours, and that’s a hopeful number.
Netbooks can go past ten or eleven hours once WiFi has been turned off, effectively giving students and flyers a long lasting computer when they really need battery life.
The iPad is similar in this way as the battery can manage in excess of ten hours depending on what you’re using it for. We browse the web over WiFi, write articles (such as this one), play games, and listen to music sporadically over a Bluetooth stereo set of headphones, and we retain charge for two days.
Try getting that on a notebook.
VERDICT: iPad wins this round.
Storage
When you buy the iPad, you’re given a choice between three capacities: 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB. There are some external storage solutions that make use of the Apple docking connector, but being hard to come by you’re pretty much stuck with the capacity your iPad ships with.
On a laptop, you always have bigger hard drives and the option to add more storage with external drives. But on an iPad, once you run out of space, you’ll have to make more room by transferring data to a computer, or backup to the cloud using solutions such as Dropbox or Apple’s future iCloud.
So the iPad is nowhere near as versatile as a notebook or netbook computer when it comes to storage options. If you need to be able to store more than 60GB locally, the iPad shouldn’t be your only tool.
VERDICT:Â Notebooks and netbooks win this one.
Conclusion
We started this article with a view to finding a reason to stop lugging our notebook around, and we found it. This article was written entirely on an iPad using its onscreen keyboard, and then sent for editing via Dropbox.
So, yes, the iPad can replace a notebook, but whether it should will depend on what you demand from a portable computer.
Netbook users have the most compelling reason to switch – heck even a 10 inch model is heavier than an iPad. If you use a lot of power-intensive applications and require capacious local storage, a notebook remains the most capable.
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.