Apple ipads (again)

[Steve Firth]

Fairly obviously you need a wifi connected printer. Without that you're not going to get far. You can use just about any old printer connected to a Linux box but the setup may be a bit tedious for some. Other than that a printer attached to a Mac attached to a network attached to WiFi.

In Safari you then select "print" which is on the same menu as "mail" and "tweet". when you select print you get a dialogue that lets you select which printer and the number of copies.

It's all considerably easier if you have an AirPrint capable printer which iirc is most of the consumer models. It's well summarised here:

[Steve Firth]

No.

As to 3g or not 3g. Part of the question is "do you want GPS". If you do then you need to have 3g because the GPS chip is part of the 3g module so it's not present in the WiFi only iPads.

[News]

ROFL! Best answer yet :-)

[RJH]

[Nick]

In message , News writes

Regarding which storage size to buy, the PCPro review linked below comments on page 2 that downloaded films, newspapers etc. are much larger (so as to take advantage of the Retina display).

If your needs don't justify the latest version I do happen to have a

64GB, 3G iPad 1 that just needs a round tuit before it goes on fleabay. The PE will work with 'nick' instead of hyphens but, as you may be aware, whether it gets through Demon's C&W Exchange servers is in the lap of the gods.

[dennis]

I have a win 7 touch screen laptop with finger and pen input and it walks over android and ipads. Its only problem is battery life, but I have three batteries if I need them.

The new win8rt surfaces will be interesting.

I want a surface equivalent with an I5 cpu and a dual touch and pen display though.

Its hard to run photoshop on an arm but that may change rsn.

[Tim+]

So it doesn't do multi-touch and it's got crap battery life.

Sounds like it's missing at least two major attributes and probably more.

Tim

[D.M.Chapman]

For home use, maybe (although personally I prefer the iPad). Beware for business use though...

Android to exchange is a whole world of pain, it doesn't support activesync correctly and is inconsistant between builds.

We are also seeing no end of problems with jelly bean...

Around 60-70% of our mobile users are on iOS devices, around 25Â% on android.

Our support load is by far the opposite - more like 85-90% android problems and and no rear facing camera that makes you look a d*****ad when you take

[D.M.Chapman]

I was amazed watching the olympics just how many people in the crowds were taking photos with them! I can see the point of a decent camera in a phone, but a huge tablet??

Darren

[D.M.Chapman]

Unlike android phones where they will have been abandoned long before a 24 month contract is up...

Dunno about tablets, but for phones the iphone is a device with a longer support life than pretty much all android ones (ignoring unofficial hacks to update them - that's not home simple use).

Again, In my experience Apple are one of the better companies for supporting older devices, Android being one of the worse platforms for this.

3GS is well over 3 years old - and is still supported with the recently release iOS6. How many 3 year old android phones have a supported upgrade path?

Darren - admittedly, a bit of an apple fan, but an owner of a touchpad running ICS :)

[Bill Taylor]

Yes, once you've set it up it's easy. Finding a kludge to get round the Apple way isn't so easy.

[Bill Taylor]

printer, you have to have a mac switched on and running an interface programme.

[John Williamson]

If you're carrying it anyway....

It makes me think of the days when photographers used to carry half-plate cameras and boxes of plates to events.

[dennis]

It does four point touch, despite what apple say multitouch has been around for a while.

Where is the pressure sensitive pen input on the iPad and/or android tabs?

I have enough batteries to last about 10 hours. 8-)

As for missing bits..

external monitor

750G disk 3 usb ports expresscard slot ethernet dvd writer keyboard

[MaRKg123]

Really, that's utter bullshit (again started by Jobs). Android is no more fragmented than iOS. Infact in many ways, Android is better, Google go to great lengths to ensure backwards compatibility libraries to enable older OS versions to use the latest Android SDK features.

Sure there are different hardware specs to deal with, but that's simple enough to deal with, and the market filtering options is superb.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

He has that.

Linux only?

Probably explains it - he uses a PC for normal stuff.

[RJH]

Fits my definition of 'easy' :-)

[Steve Firth]

Bill Taylor wrote: [snip]

No you don't.

[Steve Firth]

Given that just about every main brand consumer printer supports AurPrint why would you need to "kludge" anything? You sound like one of those people who tries to find fault because it's Apple.

Go on, explain how easy it is to set up printing for Android.

[Steve Firth]

If he's lucky and has an AirPrint printer (bought in the last two years from HP, Epson or Canon then no computer necessary. Linux not required either but there are some simple hacks for Linux to make Linux advertise a non-existent AirPrint printer that echoes output to whatever printer us attached to the Linux box.

The Macworld article gives a good summary. Lots of options ranging from no setup required at all to "bit of a hack but supports almost any printer". I think some NAS boxes come preconfigured to support AirPrint.