Abort, Rephrase, Ignore?

My conclusion after a month of traveling, plus a couple of weeks at home, is that the iPad makes for a fine e-reader, better suited to my specific needs -- particularly around lighting -- than the Kindle or any of the other e-ink readers I've used.

I don't much like that there's still no single consistent standard for e-books and e-book DRM, but at least using the iPad I can get at content provided by pretty much any of the stores even if it does mean remembering which store sold which book.

Of the e-book readers available on the platform, my preference is for the Kindle app. I know iBooks is prettier, but it again comes down to my specific needs: the Kindle app works in landscape without going to a dual-page view, and I find it easier to hold the iPad in two hands in landscape.

The iPad also makes for a really neat email device. I've been using it for work email when I'm at home (I only have the WiFi model) and while there are some things for which I still need to do the VPN+RDC dance (Nagios goes batshit, need to do a massive batch-delete) it is in general more than sufficient for keeping an eye on things and responding to short queries.

My Android phone -- a HTC Desire -- chewed through battery running CyanogenMod 6.0 at an unreasonable rate, such that on some days it came close to running out and generally wound up with under 50% left almost every day. I had assumed this was because AT&T sucks and it was having to work the radio harder, but it's been just as bad since getting home.

So I've "downgraded" back to the stock 2.1 plus Sense and will see how that goes. My one big gripe with this remains: the PIN-unlock screen uses whatever keyboard you have set as default for text entry, which is really not very efficient for entering a numeric PIN. Here's hoping they fixed that in the 2.2 update due to roll out soon.

On the bright side having Clockwork Recovery installed means I can screw around with firmware with impunity, always knowing I can roll back at any time.

Civilization V runs acceptably under Parallels 6 on the top-end Macbook Pro. I've only poked at the demo from Steam running under XP SP3, and at that not for more than about half an hour, but not only does it run, it seems to run okay. But Parallels eats the system horribly so I won't be doing that. I shall instead wait for the inevitable Mac port some time in 2012.

Looks like I can answer my own question from the previous post, i.e., how would iBooks on the iPad handle an ePub file with stupidly small fonts and wide margins?

The answer being "just fine, thanks!".

Nabbed an iPad on the way home from work today. Just the 16GB WiFi model. Primarily for use as a liseuse, though we'll see how other use-cases work out. For my specific needs it so far works well, it's heavier than the Kindle (of course), but because it's also larger and I need to hold it fairly close to my face to see without the fonts completely maxed out holding it in both hands doesn't appear to be much of a problem for me.

Removed DRM from the book I tried on the Kobo last night, synced it over to iBooks, and blammo it just works as I'd want. This will likely encourage me to pick up some books I'd been wanting but had only been able to get in ePub due to wacky regional restrictions.