Que, £15.99
Congratulations. You've just discovered that the world's most intuitive piece of technology isn't quite as intuitive as you thought it was. Never mind. An extra £16 for a book isn't much in comparison with the £400+ you've already shelled out. And it's very good news for me.
My guess is that you probably worked out how to switch your iPad 2 on, but in case you didn't, it's that button at the top. Just wait a bit for it to warm up and a load of icons will appear on your screen. And if you tilt the screen, they all move round so they are always the right way up. It's useless but pretty cool, huh! At least I hope you think so, because that's what most of your money has been spent on.
If you want to get the best out of your iPad 2 you will need to sync it with your iTunes account. This will allow you to download apps in the future and turn your iPad into a giant iPod. Albeit one that is totally unnecessary as it is far too big for the gym or the bus and you already have all your music on your computer at home. Try to think of it as a glamorous backup hard drive.
Press the Safari icon to take you on to the internet, making sure you are connected to your Wi-Fi network. If you paid an extra about £100 for a 3G iPad and have signed up for a monthly contract with a mobile phone network you can get the internet anywhere in the world. Though be prepared to be stiffed on roaming charges abroad. This makes your iPad just like an iPhone. Except you can't make any calls or send any texts.
You may also want to use your iPad for writing documents. If so iTunes is happy to sell you an app called Pages. Once installed, you can do almost everything you can do on a laptop. Only a great deal slower, as the keyboard is extremely annoying. If you find yourself getting tired of switching between keyboard screens, Apple will also sell you a separate keyboard that you can then attach to your iPad. Though at that point you may find yourself wondering why you didn't buy a laptop.
No modern, on-the-go kind of person likes to leave home without a camera and a hard drive to store photos. Luckily, your iPad 2 is just that kind of machine. Then so is your iPhone and your laptop, but somehow the pictures always look a bit better on something as groovy as the iPad 2. If you are unsure how to operate the camera or access your photos, then check the instructions for your iPhone or laptop.
The heart of the iPad 2 is the app. This is short for application. An app is something you can download from iTunes and enables you to waste hours of your time pretending to do something really constructive, such as shopping. Or going on a journey through the solar system. This is even better if you are listening to Pink Floyd. Most apps you download you will only use once. One fun thing you can do is to search for the most useless app. See if you can improve on the free app for the New Yorker. This turns out to be merely a single page portal to tempt you in to paying for a subscription to the online magazine. Brilliant.
Once you have downloaded your first app, you may struggle to find it on your iPad 2. This is because it has hidden itself on another page without telling you. You can only find this page either by accidentally flicking the screen as there is no other way of knowing this page exists. By the time you work this out, you will probably have downloaded the same app three times. This isn't the most annoying thing about your iPad 2, though. That honour goes to its refusal to run Flash player, which means you will be unable to access content from thousands of websites.
So there you have it. Well done for buying an iPad 2, an executive toy that is an unfortunate hybrid of an oversized iPod and a rubbish laptop. But don't let that worry you, because as long as you continue to suffer cognitive dissonance by insisting it's the best piece of technology ever invented, everyone will keep on buying them. And no one need know that you basically stopped using yours after a week.
Digested read, digested: Rotten apple.
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jul/25/digested-read-ipad-gary-rosenzweig
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