While I have been upgrading my phone fairly frequently over the past years, my iPad has pretty stayed the same for a long time. I got the first one with Retina display (the 3 I think), got frustrated with its weight and got a Mini as soon as that one was equipped with a Retina display. Last week, I got an iPad Pro 9.7.
Why? I will be honest, screen size. I subscribe to many iPad magazines in niche categories (mountain biking, synthesizers if you are interested) and these smaller publications do not always have apps that adjust to small screen sizes. At 46, I found them increasingly hard to read.
Also I was curious about the Apple Pencil and keyboard. The big iPad Pro tempted me, but I held out long enough to read the reviews of most users who found its size too bulky. So, here I am with an iPad Pro 9.7.
The first thing that strikes you is the incredible screen this iPad has. My iPhone 6S looks poor next to it. Second is its weight. Feels the same as my old Mini, despite a much larger screen.
The pencil is the first one that actually works for an iPad. Over the years I have tried many, many styli, and always found myself going back to paper. All my slide designs start as a sketch on a piece of paper, I like to make them big, so I burn through many trees in a month. I am hopeful that the pencil will finally end this waste. The real answer will come after a month of use or so. The pencil works nicely in the Apple Notes app, but really shines in the Paper app by 53. The only drawback of the pencil is that there is nowhere to put it. I reviewed a leather designer cover I got for my iPad 3 to carry everything around.
Multi-tasking looks useful: you can now open 2 app windows side by side.
Finally, the keyboard. I never had a problem with typing on their iPad screen, what did bother me was the pop up window for the characters. That is now gone. Attach the keyboard and you have the full screen real estate of the app. I am writing this blog post on my iPad as we "speak".
It is this keyboard that really makes my presentation design app SlideMagic work on an iPad. The text dialogue box is gone. More and more I am starting to think that SlideMagic could actually be the first presentation app that allows you to create slides on a tablet for real.
I will report back after some time for the 10,000 km review