Quote:
Originally Posted by AustinChief
And again, you missed the point... of course both have a ton of useless apps.. which is why saying "my app store has 11 bazillion apps and yours only has 200 million!!!!! I am teh WINZ!" is Corky-esque. What matters is if the amount of USEFUL apps has hit a certain critical mass... with smartphones Android has already passed that critical mass, with tablets they are catching up quickly... but given that they have only had a tablet OS for a month now, I'd say they are still a few months away from catching up.
The point is... the "we haz all the appz!!!" argument is long past moot for phones and soon will be for tablets. So pick something else to crow about.
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I've never crowed about the quantity of apps; I will say that a bunch of Apple apps seem quite useful and functional. Any of the programs I use on my Macbook for schoolwork or personal stuff, such as iWork, GarageBand, iMovie, and CeltX, I can run on an iPad 2. Penultimate is an awesome note-taking app; it's 99 cents. Comixology is free, and I can get new comics every week without going across town to the one comic book store in Lethbridge. I can watch as many movies as I want with Netflix.
And I can't stress this enough: the fact that Apple has agreements now with Inkling to make fully interactive textbooks available for download is HUGE. Inkling has access to over 95% of textbook content that universities use, and while I'm sure it's going to be a massive undertaking, the fact that Apple signed this deal first is going to continue to mean the iPad is the tablet of choice for the majority of students.
Now, I will qualify my comments by saying that for any hardcore editing, I use Adobe Premiere. But functional editing software on a tablet is kinda a big deal. And while most of my writing would be done on a normal computer, having all my stuff synced to a tablet that goes everywhere with me is particularly useful when inspiration hits at a moment's notice. I will also say that as of right now, students aren't the biggest consumers of iPads. But the idea of them is catching on; I expected to see a ton of kids with iPads this September, but it wasn't until after Christmas that they really started making appearances.
Now I'm not sure how expensive these textbooks are going to be, but the standard PDF e-textbooks are considerably cheaper (60 bucks cheaper in the case of my animal behavior text) than paper copies, and with that math in mind, an iPad pays for itself after four or five years of university. Less if you're in management, accounting, any sciences. If the cost of one semester's worth of accounting textbooks were cut in half, my roommate would have enough money to buy a 16 GB iPad. When more textbooks become available, more iPads are going to move.
To come back to the original point about apps, they're like fans at a football game. A good number of them will be intelligent, knowledgeable and useful, but they're still going to be vastly outnumbered by doofuses who couldn't tell you if the team was first or thirtieth, and didn't understand why Larry Johnson was released.