I’ve got this friend… who basically drives me crazy

He’s really nice though!

If you want a nice, friendly, attractive guy, he’s totally it.

However, you should know that he will never hold down a “real” job. I’m just trying to let you know what you’re getting in to. You see, multi-tasking is just not his thing. For some folks, that’s okay. “No big deal!” they say  For me, it’s just not going to cut it.

Basically, Donovan can’t do more than one thing at one time. For example, he has this pretty great Pandora application. If you have not yet discovered Pandora, what rock, specifically, have you been living under? Secondly, please go fix that. It is an amazing music application. Don’t let your IT department know, however, because it ties up CRAZY amounts of bandwidth. Bandwidth is… ok, never mind. Just don’t let your IT guy know.

So, Pandora. While using Donovan, I can listen to Pandora on rather decent speakers. I would go so far as to say that the sound quality is better than anticipated. However, once the application is minimized,Pandora is on ‘hold’, and all music comes to a screeching halt. So, while Donovan was great to have while working in the yard or cooking, I was unable to listen to him while doing something as simple as reading a blog.

Safari has a similar issue. Tabs are not an option, resulting a limited viewing of pages to one at a time. In order to toggle between a conversation within Gmail and Twitter (which, by the way, looks beautiful on Donovan. Tell the folks at twitter that @culotte told you so) I must first exit Twitter, go to the screen that lists all current pages, select Gmail, select “Talk”, and THEN… y’all, seriously?

That’s not called a toggle. That’s called a ridiculous.

Donovan runs the same operating system as the iPhone. While some folks have “jailbroken” their iPhones to allow for multithreading, and it seems that iPads are also able to do this, I was not about to try that out on the iPad that was not MINE. I could only see that going badly. There’s a rumor that Apple’s next operating system, OS 4.0 will allow for this, but that’s some six months away. You’d think they would have waited. Surely, I can’t be the first one to look at the iPad and go, “You mean to tell me this thing doesn’t run background processes? What’s the point in that?”

A couple of other issues have come up that have me teetering on the edge of threatening Donovan with the good ol’ toss out the door, down six flights, and through a glass window. Or maybe I’ll nominate him to be on Will It Blend?. A prime example of my frustration – trying to place photos from an iMac on to the iPad. You new iPad users out there, good luck with that. Write a tutorial. You’ll make millions. I spent an hour trying to put four photos from an iMac onto Donovan, using iPhoto, drag and drop, and well, I really don’t remember what else because I was trying not to do him bodily harm by the end of it all.

At the end of the day, I tried to pimp him out to my friend Dana, in exchange for Dana’s Macbook Pro. Because Dana is a) a great friend and b) really, really interested in all new-fangled technologies, I succeeded. I think that speaks highly for how little this product can help me. And I’ve had him just a few days.

It doesn’t matter all that much, though, as I learned today that the NCSU Libraries are only loaning out the iPads for  four hours at a time. So, basically, they know these are not efficient tools for students and already know that all they will be used for are YouTube videos, app searching and looking at Facebook.

We’ll see. I’ve got a little more than a day left with Donovan. I’m still trying to be creative in discovering things for him to do.

Besides pimping him out, I mean.