My brother that is....
He might be 4 years younger and a good 7 inches taller, but sometimes he really does know a thing or two.
Turns out this past year saw both of us transition to using iPads at work. Me, because that's how my partner & I access our EMR. My brother? Yup he started out on his iPad because he was getting so many tech support questions from the docs he worked with; he figured he might as well get one so he could play with it and figure out the answers.
So not too long ago when he was in town for a weekend visit, he and I sat down with our respective iPads and played "Show & Tell" with all our apps. Naturally, he hands down had the best, most entertaining, useful stuff ever. Me? I had a few doo-dads, but I really do use mine for work, so other than a bunch of family pictures and some books in the iBooks app, I really hadn't put much on there. Besides all my music is on my iTouch and I never have time for that in the office anyway....
About 3 hours later, I ended up with a running list of about 30-50 different apps that showed some promise. I'm constantly getting asked by my patients if they can either a) see Sam & Zoe pics, b) see Tabitha pics, or c) play games. [Turns out my partner is the game-meister -- or at least his son is; so he always out does me on having fun stuff on the iPad....] So I got some cool games. I like the "zen" ones like the koi pond and the sparkle lights in Tesla. My favorites though have been Rocket Bird and Pearl Diver. Then of course I'm a huge fan of Bejeweled and Shanghai mahjong. [Patterns - I'm definitely a pattern recognizer....That's just how I roll....]
But D*** him! The one app that he showed me that has become a HuGe time-sink has been the Amazon Kindle app for the iPad.
My A-#1 most favorite part of my iPad [besides my apple green leather case] is being able to have lots and lots of books loaded on board. I had been getting them through iBooks, but was already running into some limits. They'd have an author I liked, but not the title I wanted to read. Prior to Doug showing me the Kindle app, I had no idea that there were SO many books out there. I kid you not! Just the other day I spent about 4 hours browsing the Kindle E-book store at Amazon.com. So now I have a wish list of more than 50 books I want to read. But, wait for it... they have over 50,000 FREE books too!
And the free books my friends -- that is my downfall. Seriously. Three nights ago I found, downloaded and hoover-read through an entire 600+ page novel in about 4.5 hours. It was almost 2am when I finally crawled into bed. Which made the 7am wake-up alarm particularly harsh. But I couldn't help myself. It is simply intoxicating to have access to such a variety and range of books -- for FrEe! And then the icing on the cake is when the books themselves are so engrossing.
So tonight, I am purposely not opening that Kindle app and I am not opening another book in my queue -- mostly because I'm already pretty tired and need a full night's sleep.
I tell you what though, come the next generation of iPads, I hope they have a camera, I hope they have video like skype, and I really, really hope they keep adding more books. I'd also be pretty excited to get more amazon.com gift cards like I got for X-mas, to buy more e-books [hint, hint, nudge, nudge....].
