Can the iPad Replace my Netbook?

Can I abandon Windows completely for the iPad? First impressions indicate yes.

I spilt a glass of water over my netbook 2 days ago so I’ve been looking for a suitable replacement. My choice is between another netbook or an iPad. As a test of iOS’s capabilities I’m going to see if I can manage with no laptop and just my iPhone for a couple of weeks.

The first test was blog creation. I needed to buy some content from constant-content.com for a new site I’m developing, upload to the site and change the header graphic. All went well with finding suitable content and paying for it through PayPal. Downloading was fine too. IOS handles Word files just fine – something Windows sans Office can’t do – but in this case the file was in txt format and it had a fixed word wrap. In Windows I could deal with this by using Notepad++ to search and replace the paragraph returns. So how could I do the same thing on an iPhone without having to do it manually? The app ‘HTML Editor’ wouldn’t do it and neither would DocsToGo, QuickOffice Pro, Office2 or Pages. Eventually I discovered Textastic which permits regular expressions in its search and replace. So far so good.

Uploading the content via the WordPress app was a breeze too. In many ways it’s easier to use than the web equivalent. I especially love the way you can manage multiple blogs in the same interface.

I then had to buy an image from iStockphoto. I downloaded the app and found an image I wanted but there was nowhere in the app to buy it: probably because Apple demands 30% of the value of in-app purchases. I added the image to a new light box and then used Safari to buy it. I downloaded the high res image to Photos and then, because WordPress’s crop tool is very basic, I used Photoforge2 to crop and resize the image to the exact size I needed. Then I uploaded the file with WordPress.

So by using a combination of Safari, Textastic, iStockphoto, Photoforge2 and WordPress I’d performed tasks that I’d previously thought could only be done on a PC.