A little more about the iPad

Over the course of the last few weeks there has been a great deal of discussion about the Apple iPad. Many offices of Coldwell Banker Hearthside are running an iPad giveaway program in conjunction with their open houses, and Mortgage Mobility is offering anyone who qualifies for a mortgage before April 1 (and who closes in 2011) an iPad at settlement.

A few people have asked me to talk more about the device itself, how it works and what the practical applications are for them. Because most everyone who reads this is in the real estate business, I am going to attack this from that perspective.

First let me say this is not going to be an in-depth device review. There are plenty of those out there already. One good one I found comes from Hubert Nguyen at ubergizmo - feel free to read his post as well.

In full disclosure I have to tell you I don't own an iPad. Many of my friends do, however, and I am going to base my post on my experiences using theirs and my thoughts about the real estate business. Feel free to disagree if you have one and feel differently.

So, in general the iPad is just a larger version of the iPhone many of you use. There are different versions - one uses just the wifi signal (the wireless in your office or the local coffee shop) and another uses the cellular signal to get to the internet. Obviously, costs differ between the units and the cellular one requires a data plan much like your cell phone does. If you are shopping, shop accordingly. [in case you are curious, the Mortgage Mobility and CBHearthside model being offered is the wifi one, not the cellular one.]

Because it is like an iPhone, the key to making it work is understanding just what "apps" are going to make your device ideal for you. Apple's iTunes library is enormous, and the number of iPad-specific apps is growing every day. That said, there are still some drawbacks of the iPad that need to be understood. The iPad does not run Flash, which (up until Apple said it wouldn't support it in their devices) was one of the building blocks of the internet. Without getting too techy, there is a big debate about how web sites are going to work without Flash (especially web video), so you have to know right away that your iPad may not do all the video/movie watching you want it to do. [Note, I just read that a Flash-enabling app has been released in the iTunes store but since I haven't read any reviews yet I am not prepared to say much else].

Browsing the web happens via Apple's standard browser, called Safari. If all you have ever used is Internet Explorer, you may find some challenges changing browsers but not much. I used the iPad Safari browser to scan a few of the sites we use regularly, and with the exception of ToolKit CMA (which only works on Internet Explorer) things seemed to work pretty well. Of course anything that requires you to save data to a hard drive isn't going to work as well, because the iPad isn't designed for sophisticated file storage. [it does have plenty of SD card memory but the file tree isn't that deep (in other words, there isn't a "my documents" folder with subfolders, etc)].

The other thing to be considered is that the iPad doesn't have a disc drive or even a USB port for inserting a flash drive (another function of the way the memory is designed) so you need to use a service like SugarSync to move data between your devices (don't know SugarSync? Check out this video Stefanie did just last week highlighting how it works).

So why is it so great? Think about the upsides for the real estate business. You can turn it on quickly (there is no "boot up" time for an iPad), you can access the internet pretty quickly and you can move between apps quickly. It is great when you want to just jump on quickly and answer a few emails or post a quick facebook status update - especially if you find the font size of your smart phone a challenge. With the Keynote app you can present Powerpoint slides easily (which is an even bigger hit if you are using a powerpoint listing presentation like the one offered from the revised ToolKit CMA program) and you can write contracts (with the exception of the soon-disappearing RealFast program) on the fly. As a mobile real estate professional I can see many features that can justify the cost.

Like I said earlier, however, I am interested in how the rest of you use your iPads, or the questions you have about how you could use them. Let's make this a discussion! I look forward to your input.