The minimalist Apple approach to packaging reveals an iPad, Cable and plug along with a little piece of paper and little else when you open the box. For context, I have the 64g Verizon 3g model.
Where to get started? Of course, the device is pretty intuitive and that’s behind a lot of it’s appeal. That being said, there are a lot of little basic tips that are not obvious when you pick it up that make it so much nicer to use. I will post these lessons I have learned as separate tips and maybe come back here to link them, or you can just filter on the iPad tag to get a good overview.
As a first step – you have to plug it in to iTunes to get anywhere, and set up your account and synch preferences. I found great success using my Google account as a hub account for all my contacts across my devices and computers since I can synch the Google contacts with my windows, apple, linux and android systems with no problems. This may sound minor, but having one global address / contact set across all is a real boon and I can manage the contacts using the Google engine which is actually pretty effective.
In iTunes, you will also have the option of setting up picture, music, video etc synching. I suggest you make a playlist for your iPad that can pull in the playlists you want but reflects a subset of your entire collection. In my case this is especially important as my music collection is larger than the entire iPad storage system. Since you have the ability to stream tunes, you may not need much music, but it is nice to have it available for those times you may find yourself off line and not in possession of another music device or not want to hassle with another one. Another point in this is if you intend to do any of the fun stuff you can do with music like make sound tracks to movies and such, though that is another post.
For the pictures, again I advocate creating a dedicated folder in your pictures library on your main machine that is for the iPad. Of course, your particular usage pattern will drive how fast you run out of space, but planning ahead with structure that makes it easy to manage makes it better. When you connect your iPad and synch, it will pull these photos over and changes will reflect both ways though a real annoyance is that the iPad only recognizes one folder level with the native photos application. Do not expect to have nested folders and see them separate on the iPad. Break everything into one level down and you will be golden.
An interesting behavior on the photo bit is that the iPad drops all the photos you take into the camera role, which is NOT synched with this album. You can manually pull them over through explorer view and this includes many apps that edit photos, then drop them into the camera folder regardless of where they came from.
Check out all the free podcasts and content for some nice HD content to enjoy on the go and set up the synch to keep at least a few active episodes on the device.
Regarding iBooks – this is a treasure trove of available content. There is a huge selection of free books that you can search for to get started and I found the interface to be great and the layout nice. I will post a dedicated note on the organization here, but don’t miss the ability to create separate collections inside the iBook app.
There is much more on the setup, but I will post some follow ups to break up the content into digestible bits and link them. I am very much enjoying the device and at the same time, a little shocked at some of the simple things missing. All told, it is a great tool and a very fun toy.
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