I’ve been lazy with my reviews, so here’s one about a product that has helped me catch up lately! I started back to school for the year in August taking on a 19 credit course load! All I can say is: whoa! How is a mom of three busy children supposed to keep everything organized, work and do great in school? I decided to get technical and try another Apple product.

I picked up a 32gb iPad in September in an attempt to better organize my life, and boy have I given it a workout! I have to start by saying that I previously brought my Aluminum Macbook to school everyday in order to follow along on power points, do assignments and have an easy way to look up the information I was looking for. I love my Macbook, but lets face it, it can be a bit heavy and cumbersome. The iPad may seem like a giant iPhone and many people say it wont replace a laptop, I beg to differ.

The iPad comes with many standard features that you may already be familiar with on your iMac or iPhone including: iCal, Notes, Contacts, Mail and Safari among others. We are also big fans of MobileMe to help keep our calendars organized and contact books synced.

After unboxing and playing around with my new toy, I immediately purchased 3 apps that I knew would come in handy to make the iPad an essential tool for me. Pages, Keynote and Task PRO. Pages allows me to download (or load) my study guides and assignments right to the iPad so I can review and work on the go. Pages does come with a lot of useful templates and I am even able to create newsletters and documents for work by loading my own templates too! Keynote allows me to view Power Point presentations my instructors lecture from, enabling me to follow along easier no matter where I sit. I can pull up the information again at anytime without printing off several dozen pages. Task PRO allows me to keep track of lectures, skills and assignments so I always know what I need to get done. The extra wireless keyboard we had for one of our iMacs works very smoothly with the iPad to make typing even easier. Although, I do find that having to turn off the bluetooth when I’m wanting to use the onscreen keyboard again is a bit frustrating.

With wireless enabled I can study and research anywhere on campus or at home. The iPad fits easily in my purse so I don’t have to worry about forgetting it at home, its always on hand so that I can pull it out to study whenever I have down time without bringing a bulky laptop or piles of papers.

Besides the education and organization aspects of the iPad I’ve also found that its become an awesome tool in other areas of my life as well. With the camera adapter I use the iPad to free up camera space and easily share pictures with others. When I’m ready to load them to my computer it transfers full resolution versions of my photos! I won’t have to tell other photographers how valuable it is to be able to proof photos right on location versus waiting until you’ve gotten back to a home computer. Instead of shoving the latest book I’m reading into my purse, I can purchase it for my iPad and have it with me without having to worry about bent pages or losing my place. The screen is also the perfect size for watching movies. Earlier this month I had to bring 2 of my children to a boring meeting with me. Thinking ahead, I loaded a favorite kids’ movie and plugged in 2 sets of headphones. (jack splitters are invaluable for multi-kid families!) The only noises they made during my meeting was the occasional giggle of glee. The iPad helped get us out of there much faster so we could get to the really fun stuff, like playing at the park!

The bad? I want WiFi printing! hey, awesome that it allows bluetooth printing, but I don’t have a bluetooth printer! Our home network is all wireless with wireless printing, it would be amazing to be able to print my documents without having to sync to my computer. Fortunately, Apple seems to be taking this request seriously and promises to unleash WiFi printing to the ipad in November. Yay! I also with this device had a USB port to allow easier data transfer, but I can live without. Many say the lack of camera is a deal breaker for them, not so much for me. I can’t imagine trying to take a picture with the iPad, it just is not light enough to comfortably do so. Which brings me to weight. Sure, its lighter than a laptop, but it does have some weight to it. You wouldn’t want to hold it out in front of you for long, but I haven’t found that I’m tempted too either. I sit with it either on my lap or table anyways, so it hasn’t been a big deal for me.

Overall it has been well worth the investment! I feel more organized now and don’t worry about missing an assignment or not having my materials with to study. I’m sure I’ll get a lot more use out of it as I continue on as well.

As an apple fan girl it pains me to say it, but my 3G iPhone is now almost completely unusable. I am incredibly disappointed with the lack of warning 3G users were given. It leaves me to wonder 2 things: did Apple simply drop the ball and not test enough on the 3G phones? Or was this killer iOS 4 software upgrade an intentional ploy to get 3G users, who are most likely near the end of their contracts, to upgrade to the new 4G phones? Either way it makes me instantly have painful flashbacks to my Microsoft days and the crippling money pit that was Windows ME. *shudder* Why Apple, why?!

I first thought that maybe it was just me. Perhaps I had a bad download and upgrade? Maybe I needed to reboot my phone more than a dozen times? Maybe I’m just expecting too much? A quick Google search confirmed my fears, 3G users all over are having issues and Apple has been silent.

Like most people, I anxiously plugged in my iPhone to do the upgrade that promised to rock. I knew I would be missing out on some features, but that was ok. At least I wasn’t being left in the dark like the 2G users were, right? I’d soon discover that perhaps they were the lucky ones. After upgrading my iTunes and struggling with the upgrade process freezing several times I finally decided to delete all backups and start over. I should have seen the signs and given up at this point. Over 2 hours later, or longer – after awhile I was too frustrated and just walked away to let it try to sort itself out, I finally had the coveted iOS 4 on my iPhone. Yay! Or so I thought.

It didn’t take long to figure out that my iPhone just wasn’t the same. As I was drooling over the new features I started to notice that my once fast companion was now very sluggish. My phone is not even half full so this shouldn’t be an issue. After several reboots the issue had not resolved. I took a deep breath and told myself I could deal with that. If that had been my only issue I could have lived with it, unfortunately it was just the beginning.

I’m not sure of the extent of other iPhone users’ issues because many are complaining about features that were not intended for our phones to begin with, but here is a list of the ones I have been having. For disclosure purposes I have a 8GB iPhone 3G. My husband has a 16GB 3Gs and while he has not experienced the vast list of bugs I have, he has noted quite a few himself. Each of us have iMacs that we use to sync our phones with.

Here are the wounds that are crippling my poor iPhone:
#1 Sluggishly slow. The phone lags so bad that texting or inputting any text on the phone can be almost painful.
#2 My phone freezes more than a slurpee brainfreeze in Antartica.
#3 Folder glitchiness. When switching between apps and folders they sometimes behave erratically, and then lead back to issue #2.
#4 Incoming calls randomly fail to display name or number.
#5 Incoming calls lagging when connecting, sometimes not able to even answer the call.
#6 Any notification received by the phone while in standby mode causes the phone to become non-responsive. This forces me to do a frustrated series of home button mashing while trying to restrain myself from chucking the phone across the room.
#7 When trying to simply wake the phone from sleep/standby mode the slider bar often is non-responsive. I found that I can bypass the slider button by performing the aforementioned home button mashing enough times. This causes my phone to suddenly come alive with a random app open. Hey, at least its past the dang slider bar screen!
#8 Random contact list and folder errors. I found that the phone function on the phone is very glitchy, especially the contacts. On several occasions now I’ve opened up my phone, selected my contact to call from my contact list, placed the call, finished the call, closed the phone and proceeded to open an app or do some other function on the phone before putting it back into sleep mode. When I decided to try to use the phone again I attempted to get to the home page and would find that the contact page would be open again and when I closed it a folder would be open as well. Its almost like my phone is trying to evolve into a multitasking phone on its own and failing miserably.
#9 Apps suddenly closing or crashing more frequently. Memory issues?

At times it seems my phone can’t decide what it wants to allow me to achieve. It feels like trying to convince a cranky overtired toddler that peas are the best food on Earth. In the end I am left with a barely functional iPhone and my family is avoiding me in fear that they may unintentionally get in the path of a flying phone if I lose my patience one.more.time. The 3G phone that I ran through the wash on extended rinse cycle is looking like it just might be more functional than my current phone is now. That is, as long as I don’t upgrade the OS on it.

Apple, where is the update? Why are you so silent on this?

If you like Photography or graphic editing and use a Mac computer (like me) you may have heard of Apple’s program called Aperture. This program is based on iPhoto that is included on all newer Apple computers. My husband and I both enjoy photography and have been exploring more into the post production editing of the photos we take. This led us to try out Aperture.

Aperture is a nice program and highly revered in the photography world. It makes editing easy and is especially helpful if you enjoy editing RAW photo formats. The photo editing options are endless and too many for me to get into. Taking a simple self photo with my photo booth on my iMac I played around with some of the presets and got a feel for how this would work for amateur person jumping in. Having used Photoshop and Pixelmator the Aperture layout is very different, as well as the workflow. You shouldn’t let this detour you though, it is very easy to navigate. I did have some confusion on how to actually save a project once I was done with my edits, I did manage to discover the export feature which is not very straight forward. I have to say that I find this a great tool for photo editing and does a lot, but I would not say it is a standalone program. I think you’d still want another heftier program like Photoshop to really polish your work.

My husband and I both discovered one major flaw, freezing. We’ve been testing this software on 21.5″ iMac computers that are pretty new (new in Feb 2010). We found that Aperture will spontaneously freeze during a workflow and require a system reboot to allow the computer to work again. I’m a huge Mac fan and have NEVER had any issues with freezing, even when running Parallels and dual operating systems with a gazillion programs. This is my third Mac computer and I can attest to the reliability of the system. So these sudden freezes in Aperture are highly frustrating. We’d expect this from a Microsoft product, not an Apple product. Tsk tsk. A quick search on Google confirms that this is not a issue that only we are having.

So overall, this program has the potential for greatness, but falls short on reliability. We’ll try it again once Apple takes care of the stability issues. Want to try it out for yourself? Check out the 30 day trial at Apple.

Don’t want to take my word for it? Check out this PCWorld review that addresses the Aperture freezing issues.