I finally bought an iPad around about the 1st of June. My dear wife and I had agreed some time before that I could buy an iPad when I had lost 2 stone in weight. I'm not just a grumpy old devil, I'm a fat, grumpy old git. However, back to the narrative. Then Pat, who had been thinking about a birthday present for some time, decided that she wanted a new laptop, so we went to our favourite store. The very nice man at John Lewis' Emporium showed us several, and we settled on a nice Tosh that neatly balanced power, processor and gigabytes, though I suspect we bought it just as much because it was a nice colour. (Did I mention fat, grumpy, old, sexist git?). Then my beloved, love of my life, my perfect woman, said, "We'll, I suppose you'd better get that iPad you want, while we're here." Did I tell you how much I love my wife?
I fell in love with my iPad straight away. It's simply the easy way that it does anything you throw at it. The only problem that I have with it is that once outside the house it loses some of it's usefulness, because I chose to buy the WiFi model, but I don't regret the choice. After three months I have set it up with a series of apps that are happy to work offline, so I do all my synching at home, but use the iPad wherever I am. And the quality of the screen. Whatever you hear about the retina display, it's true. I'm sitting here, writing on the screen with one finger, with the iPad balanced on the chair arm, half watching the news and blogging.
I heard about the forthcoming upgrade to iOS 6 several weeks ago, then I heard the date September 19th, but I waited, not really knowing what to expect. I have never been an Apple user. I started with a ZX Spectrum, then I got a BBC B, then an Archimedes. That was probably the best, fastest, most powerful, easiest to use, computer that I have ever, or will ever own. Unfortunately it was not mainstream. The software was difficult to get and expensive, and Acorn just failed to survive, but what a pity. The Acorn Archimedes should have been the computer that dominated the world, not the ever crashing peecee. The last time Microsoft upgraded the OS on my Peecee it cost an arm and a leg to buy the upgrade, so I was astonished to find that the upgrade to iOS 6 was free and delivered wirelessly.
So I spent the day waiting for it to happen. In the end I remembered that Apple are based in California, and Wednesday 19th September would probably start later over there. And then it just happened. Just before tea time a neat little message said that there was an upgrade available, and would I like to install it. I said that would be a nice idea and it asked me, oh so politely, if would like to plug in the electrical power lead, "to save the battery." How very thoughtful! In the end I put it on the shelf by my router because it kept losing the wifi signal sitting in the lounge.
When I upgraded my Peecee from Vista to Windows 7 I ended up doing the upgrade 3 times because it kept losing important bits of code, and that was upgrading from a CD. The iOS 6 upgraded just seems to have worked. So far, I haven't really spotted the difference. I now have something called Siri which, so far, keeps telling me that it doesn't know what I'm asking for, but that's probably because it's struggling with a Northerner. I'll let you know how I get on with that. I also noticed that Apple are clearly breaking their links with Google. The Maps app used to be a version of Google maps, but now it is running a version of Tom Tom, oh well! I also noticed that Yahoo has got a toe in the door somewhere, but we'll see how that develops. And now there is a very pretty clock app.
But it hasn't really changed the way that I use this wonderful gadget! That will do for now. See you tomorrow.
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