I do 90% of my out of work web browsing on my ipad, i don’t miss flash videos at all. I also block it on my work computer and home desktop.

I suspect Apple did a cost benefit analysis of making the iPad Flash compatible and decided the impact on the CPU and security issues weren’t worth it and/or solving them would have meant compromises elsewhere.

I think you just have to be realistic aout what you want a tablet to do. I held off for ages about the iPad , but the other day I bought a refurb original one from apple and I have to admit that I as much as I thought I wouldn’t like the whole apple iTunes malarky, as a user experience, the iPad itself is brilliant.

The whole thing is fast enough, very few of the sites I would visit have items I can’t view and in all honesty, if I want to bash out a complicated document, I’ll resort to the main pc. The rest of the time, the iPad handles it fine without delay.

The most surprising thing is the books … I never thought I would use it so much to read books

I’m still waiting for one that I can scribble and make notes on.
Then I’ll ditch my laptop (maybe)

I’m still waiting for one that I can scribble and make notes on.
Then I’ll ditch my laptop (maybe)

You can already do that.

I suspect Apple did a cost benefit analysis of making the iPad Flash compatible and decided the impact on the CPU and security issues weren’t worth it

I doubt it. Any sensible solution if you weren’t anti-flash on principle would have been to leave it off by default but allow the user to switch it on, with associated warnings.

@clubber? which one?

re flash – apart from being a processor hog, many sites require a mouse, drop downs etc – a touch interface doesn’t have a hover state so many of these sites simply wouldn’t work.

and flash to deliver video has never made sense!

i imagine sites like bbc will switch to html5 within a year…

@Travis – ipad (and presumably other tablets) – plenty of apps that you can either write notes (keyboard) or ‘drawing’ apps where you can just write on the screen. Or have I misunderstood what you want?

@clubber, not misunderstood, I never said my point clear enough.

I would love to scribble and make notes on pdf or doc on an ipad type thing.
It would make my life so much easier

Not sure about iPad but for the iPhone there is a dedicated BBC News app which works fine and plays all the videos and presents content in a more “mobile friendly” version than the main BBC site.

Failing that, you can use the Skyfire browser which plays all the videos on the BBC site just fine.

+1. Never found a lack of Flash a problem, and the iPad BBC apps are lovely. Airdrive and the like works well instead of USB, thoguh I’d likean SD card slot. Can’t see why it’s a problem to fit one really, so it must be a religous argument vs how you get content on to it.

There is a statement somewhere on the iPlayer site about how they are addressing the lack of Flash for idevices, so it will be a non issue for the BBC at least – current iPlayer app works very nicely. Think it was HTML5 as this appears to be where browsers are headed.

You can do that using several apps I believe – GoodReader (I use it on my iPhone) certainly does it.

http://www.labnol.org/software/annotate-pdf-on-ipad-iphone/17844/

http://www.google.co.uk/#hl=en&source=hp&q=goodreader+annotate&aq=f&aqi=g10&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&fp=1&cad=b

I would love to scribble and make notes on pdf or doc on an ipad type thing.
It would make my life so much easier

Can do that with GoodReader, I think – at least type notes, and add highlighting etc.

EDIT – too slow 🙁

ohhhh…. could be just what I want. Thanks for that 😀

Is it possible to change the default browser? I like Firefox and don’t get on with Safari, can I change that?

Safari on an ipad/iphone isn’t the same as safari on a pc (or presumably mac – I wouldn’t know).

You can get opera for them though. And several others.

You can’t change the default browser though (at least not as standard – jailbreaking may allow it).

Google Reader + Flipboard = amazing!

oh! flipboard looks good – shame it’s not out on the iphone until the summer. Anyone know any alternatives – my taptu looks reasonable.

Many thanks for all the debate, I want something that I can just browse with on the sofa, but have the ability to do more when ‘docked’, so being able to add memory or even an external drive will be paramount to me.
I’m sure the flash debate will soon be dead, but as others have mentioned you just can’t play some games with touchscreen, so maybe it would be nice to be able to use a mouse, or even a touchpad on the keyboard.

Now, anyone have any thoughts on the Asus Transformer? 😉

Cheers.