iPad Musings - part 3

Regular readers would know I’ve been using an iPad 2 since launch and have been discussing the benefits of the generally outstanding device.  Today I’ll cover some not-so-great things about it to put it in a little perspective.  So, my top three grievances about basic tasks I would have thought would be simple on an iPad are:

Printing.  Forget it.  Unless you have a Mac in the house and certain printers and configure it correctly, you can’t print from your iPad.  At all.  Workarounds to this are also difficult – I thought I may be able to print to a PDF file then email that to myself and print it on my PC, but printing to PDF isn’t supported either.

The built-in Photo browsing app is extremely poor.  You can view pictures you have put on the device but you have absolutely no ability to manage those photos.  I would have thought you could sit on your couch with your iPad and go through your photo library on your PC and delete, move etc your photos but not.  Its view only and unless you are careful in iTunes and the way you sync your photos it won’t show your neatly organised folders either. 

Because iOS (the iPad and iPhone “operating system” or software) doesn’t have a proper “file structure” like a PC or a Mac, saving attachments from emails and doing something with them is also difficult and not intuitive.  Likewise, inserting a picture into an email you are sending is also not simple.  Very odd for such a media focussed device.

With no USB port its also not easy to download files and easily save them to use on another device.

Have you found any annoyances?