The iPad is a tiny TV ! With on-board power

I am suffering because I have an iPad 1. (Is it Ok to admit having just an iPad 1, not an iPad2 ? Well let the social mores take a walk, I have an iPad 1. If that means I can only use the washroom marked for the serfs so be it.) But I am suffering because of my iPad 1 and here is my list of woes

Strangely enough for a device named iPad, it insists on capitalizing the first word of every sentence. That may seem a good thing to you. But if it also capitalizes the beginning of your user id which can get irritating at times. Because all my user ids start with a small letter. (Oops! did the social engineering hackers learn something about me. Wait let me check my bank balance.). What happens when you type iPad as the first word of a sentence on the iPad -  hang on let me check - funnily enough it corrects it to Ipad. So obviously all those kids writing marketing material for the iPad on the internet are not using iPads. They are using Microsoft Word because - just checked on Microsoft Word 2010 - while it does not allow iPad as the first word of a sentence it does give the option of correcting it to iPod. But you can add it to the dictionary and once you have done it you can type iPad as the first word of a sentence. Like they say in Hindi - which can apply well to all of the things Microsoft does - "dheri hain, lekin andheri nahin" - meaning "they may be late in getting the hang of things, but they are not blind to reality". Then there are a whole set of Steve Jobs-ish idiosyncrasies in the auto-correct function on the iPad but I will let you discover it on your own.

Then I move to my email. I received a PDF from my bank. I double click the PDF, it prompts for a password. The password is in my email. I search it and then tap the password to copy it. Nothing happens. Then I tap it several times and yet nothing happens. Then I realize you need to tap it and hold it for a while for the word to be selected. But hey - hold on - if I tap and hold sometimes the entire paragraph gets selected. And then sometimes nothing gets selected. Apparently there a few things you need to get right in doing cut/paste on an iPad. One of them is that you need thin & nimble fingers. Not quite the same as using a wireless optical mouse. Which makes me wonder - if Apple is all that cool why is it that they do not know how to implement an easy copy/paste. I cannot work without copy/paste. For instance, I sent an email to a few friends and then wanted to share the email with other friends whose email id I do not have. But I know them on FB. I try to copy and paste from email into FB and several things go wrong.

Try hitting the forward option on the yahoo mail app on the iPad and for some strange reason the body of the forwarded email is not shown. So you if want to read and edit the forward before you send it ... well boot up your laptop. Oh and there are thousands of websites that run Flash videos which the iPad stubbornly refuses to render. And when I look for a USB port I cannot see one. And where is the camera? And try editing your Microsoft Excel sheet on an iPad.

The iPad is good for viewing stuff others have made. If you want to comment, co-create or create content, boot up that PC. There is a device just like the iPad and is in almost every home everywhere across the world. It accepts only touch input, plays video and sound extremely well, cannot do co-creation or commenting, cannot do text editing. Only thing, you cannot lift it and carry it around. But then, neither can you watch the Lord of the Rings on the iPad. It is called a TV and has been around for some time now. And costs half as much. If you have the money, skip the iPad, buy a TV and a Laptop and donate the money you save to the poor kids in southern Sudan.