I ordered an iPad Air (again) on Sunday and picked it up on Monday. So far, it’s quite good, with the Apple Pencil being the killer feature of the device. Scribble is what makes it shine, and what i’m writing this blog post with. It allows to just write text anywhere with the pencil to anywhere in the OS. It is a way better experience than what I had with a Surface Pro X.
The built-in notes application is quite basic. I ended up buying GoodNotes from the App Store to have OCR that recognises French and actual separation between pages. Being able to import a PDF is a very useful feature too.
As such, the tablet fulfils the purpose for which it was bought for, taking notes, quite well. However, it’s worth noting that you can only have two windows at the same time on an iPad. Slide over in a sense allows to have a third window but is not worth the complexity most of the time, as it obscures another window in part.
On purpose, I avoided buying a keyboard for this machine, or for that matter using one. In part because of iPadOS being too locked down and in the other hand because multitasking is too limited, it is not a reasonable laptop replacement for my use.
The virtual keyboard is not what I’d call suitable for programming, and scribble is really not designed for that purpose. Sidecar, for using the iPad as a display for my Mac, turned out to not be too interesting, especially as it reduces usable screen area by quite a bit.
Unlike macOS, I can see the battery status of my Galaxy Buds directly within the OS without using a Samsung app.