Last night an iPad saved my life
Just a quick update on how useful my ipad is turning out to be.
Pre-editorial note; wait for the 3G, the reason will become clear shortly.
Having left hospital after an operation, I was forced to take a break from office life, so off too Sandbanks in Poole for 4 days.
On the way there the road was closed and we had to wait for hours, whilst I read a few chapters of my ebook, I could really have done with some online mapping on the iPad to get round the traffic, alas no 3G.
Once there, with the hotel kindly providing free wifi, 3.5mb so not too bad, we surfed the web, checked tv listings, found nearby attractions for the rainy days that did not happen and generally left the iPhones switched off, we even had a good laugh at the price of holiday houses in Sandbanks, circa £800k for a 3 bed apartment!
Now we all know hotel tv sucks and my 2.5 year old loves a bit of firman sam before bed, well luckily we had a few downloaded on the iPad, which my daughter Sophie can now happily use.
Then the power went off in the hotel from about 6pm to 11pm. No drama there, we finished up watching Peppa Pig, put Sophie to bed and then settled down to Harry Brown with our wine and fish & chips.
The battery is truly amazing on the iPad, hardly using any power at all for hours of videos. Once we had finished the film, drunk our wine and polished off a bag of Revels, we hopped into bed and I read another 100 pages of The girl with the dragon tattoo.
Once the power came back on, sadly the choice of TV channels was reduced to Sky news and Sky sport, so for the next two nights we streamed all our tv through Catchup TV, which I was very impressed with from a quality point of view, in fact it was flawless. (apologies to the other guest who had terrible wifi due to our streaming).
Whilst the iPad is no Kindle, it was for those few hours a lot better given we had no lights. And whilst my weekend away may not sound that exciting, a evening in a hotel room with no lights and a 2 yr old child has the makings of a murder.
So thank you Steve for saving my life and providing us all with some much needed R&R.
The iPad has proved to be a game changing device for me, my daughter and my parents. It’s simple, compact, so very usable and above all it does what it says on the tin.