Thanks - an interesting perspective.

Two key things stand out for me:
1 - battery life on the iPad is significantly longer on the iPad, and
2 - the keyboard dock is an extra $150 - I thought it came WITH the Transformer - I was very seriously considering the Transformer BECAUSE it appeared to come WITH the keyboard & dock. This extra $150 spend is an absolute deal breaker for me.

HOWEVER, what is clear is just how close the 2 devices are in most respects. So how is a potential buyer to choose?

It comes down to those less tangible things that separate one product from another... not features so much, as benefits that arise from having, or not having, these intangibles... user experience and eco system for example.

In the article here ->http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-19512_7...trtcol;mostPop...

... Intel seems to be setting its strategy on 'my chip/ultrabook has better features than yours' - anybody truly familiar with the psychology of why people buy, will know that the primary decision making is driven by emotion, not logic - the logic is simply there to rationalise the emotional decision. Otherwise why would so many mid-range of any product, as well as top-end products (cars, clothes, tablets etc) be bought?

It's not about features, its about benefits. The 2 are very different. I wonder when those involved in hi-tech marketing will finally accept that...?

The winner is... The New Ipad! Bought it yesterday, having fun playing with it.

Last two paragraphs of the article:
This is a very fair analysis of the situation.

System administrators stick with what they know -- Microsoft. Remember, just like IBM, nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft! But you're probably old enough to just escape.

BTW, if you're moving to a Linux desktop (and the desktop is dead don't you know!), just use RHEL -- no hobbyists there.

So a bit of a follow up to the brain dump earlier, now that I've figured out a few things and had more time getting shit that should "just work" to work.

Photos - Now have them synced to the iPad. Had to tick the network share under the iTunes advanced drop down on the laptop, which then ungreyed out the iPhoto options under the iPad when that is connected to the laptop and then able to select the albums and they got synced. Not intuitive at all.

So far, not figured out how to stream these albums to the tele via AppleTV either, it sees the pics that are in "Photo Stream", which are pics that were taken on the iPad, but you can't move the pics in other albums to it.

Movies and Videos - Was able to add some videos to iTunes, which then got synced to the iPad. Unfortunately, even though iTunes can play these mkv/avi/mp4 files, it only adds some of the mp4 files to the library which can then get synced. Some of these mp4's are from the same source which didn't work and none of the other file times work. So that means only a couple of these videos can be streamed to the AppleTV, but when they work, it's quite nice, but more don't work.

USB/SD Drives - Tried for a laugh to format some, on the Mac, and a couple of them now show up on the iPad. It's weird because these thumb drives worked fine on the Mac, iMac, WD TV etc...but anyway, so formatted on the Mac, they appear. The Photo app loads up and you can import photos, but you can't view any other files, so it's not very useful. Using a third party USB/SD app, can see the files, but am unable to import the files to the iPad.

Apps - Whole bunch have had updates over the week which fixed stability on a few of them. Evernote, when you load a page is still unable to get to the home state to see your notes, so needs to be removed and re-installed. It also turns out the DirectTV app isn't worth having as the folks don't have the wifi extension box for the satellite box and the router is to far to use a ethernet cable, so they were a little disappointed but this isn't really a Apple fault.

They also have realised all these remote control apps they have seen and played with don't work without buying a third party IR emitter extension for the iPad. They had thought the iPad had one built in, tbh, so did I.

Apple TV - Some stuff mentioned above. Also, the iPad app for it, easy to get working, but it's not very nice to use. Also there's no Hulu, Vudu, Crackle or Amazon Prime, which is a big disappointment. The folks use Crackle a lot to watch cheesy old western movies and wanted to use Amazon Prime, as that's a little sluggish on their BluRay player.

DNLA App - It's now working, able to see stuff from other servers to play stuff on the iPad, but on the freebie, it will only play the first 3 files in a folder, to play the rest you need a "Pro" version, also it will only encode a few codecs, some of the others you need to faff around with IAP's to buy them. When it worked, it was pretty good but they won't use it enough to bother. It also doesn't push content on the iPad out to the AppleTV nor the BluRay.

Bluetooth Keyboard - When the bluetooth is on and the keyboard is around, it now appears to stop the iPad screen keyboard from popping up when you want it to and the only way to get it up is to then disable bluetooth. It seems so random. Have tried unpairing and re-attaching the keyboard, also put in new batteries. No idea, but it seems a common enough problem.

Wallpaper and Lockscreen Image - Using high res photo's, easy enough to sort out, can scroll around to where to focus on the photo. Thing is, it then doesn't focus on that area and the photo's look like junk.

Other random stuff - Quite nice to arrange apps to the base toolbar, so added FB and Skype to it.

So over all, it's still a good device. Not worth the premium for it. Shit that should be simple and intuitive just isn't and you'd have expected it to have been a Microsoft sort of issue.

A lot of these issues no doubt are human error and just not knowing how to do things, but they're pretty basic things so should not be a issue.

Anyway, so if anyone knows what I'm doing wrong, a shout out would be appreciated so I can sort the folks out before we head home to MA, as I so don't want to deal with it over the phone.

The video problem is because it's very finicky about formats that it'll see. The file handle is a complete misnomer as it's simply a holder for the media files inside and it's those media files that the iPad is struggling with. Could try VLC and see if that'll play the files.

However, the easiest thing to do is recode into something the iPad can see.

The USB/SD card thing is a pita. It'll see photos all day long, but other files it'll refuse to play with.

Sounds like you've done more with your iPad in 2 days than we've done in 2 years with ours!

I use Air Video Server - a free desktop app for my Mac does video conversion on the fly and streams it via the network (wireless) to my iPad. A $1.99 app on my iPad picks this up & displays it. Seems to happily convert all manner of file formats as I believe it uses the same core library as VLC.

I get no jitter, jump or freeze frames - none - and watch about 80% of my viewing this way - on iPad, full screen. Nice.

I'm not going to the hassle of re-encoding the vids for the sake of the folks.

The problem is, they want to give their laptop to MIL's mother and just have the ipad for themselves.

That's why they want the content and getting it on the iPad just isn't happening and iTunes wasn't making it easy, so the streaming options or other media players just aren't an option, annoyingly :/

Did find another streaming media app, flex8? Something like that, worked really well on pulling stuff off my laptop and the like that had content shared, but doesn't help the folks much when they don't have the content at hand..and this app would only play the first 5 files in a folder unless you paid for a full version, which they didn't want to do. It did work really well though, seemed to stream pretty much everything I threw at it like a charm and you had the option to push it to the apple tv.

One thing that I didn't like about the iPad is that the screen isn't true wide screen, which just seems daft to me...waste of resolution having half the movie cropped or with black bars on the top/bottom of the screen.

Oh and the other weird thing is how very sensible, calm folks can turn into complete raving psycho's when playing Angry Birds

I use Serviio on my netbook to do the same and had it on the folks laptop, really nice streaming software.

All these options work great if you're got a computer on the network...this whole "we'll be fine without a laptop" business, doing my head in

Easiest?

No.

Inside the DOJ's ebook price-fixing case against Apple: an analysis

"You set the price, and we get our 30 percent, and yes, the customer pays a little more, but that's what you want anyway."

http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/11/29...le-an-analysis

Evil!

Totally and utterly agree with the EVIL tag on the basis of the DOJ report. I wasn't aware of this. And I'm pretty miffed. I've not bought very many ebooks at all because of the prices - having been used to paying under £4/$6 for a book from Tesco's and the like back in the UK... I hate the fact books in the US are SO much more expensive...