Eight Ways One Boomer Uses Her iPad Daily

Recently, I had a fascinating conversation with my niece who won an iPad at a charity event. She said she only uses it to play Scrabble, but that her 11 year old daughter uses the iPad for numerous things like watching downloaded TV programs and playing games. In her house, an iPad has become an entertainment device for her child. That made me think of the many ways I use my iPad, and I know I am not making as much use of it as many people.  Here are eight  ways I use my iPad on a daily basis.

1.  Checking email. My iPad is upstairs where I don't have a "real" computer, and I don't carry my phone with me around the house. Therefore, I check my email on the iPad quite often.  I usually don't write lengthy replies on the device, but save that task for my computer that has a more comfortable keyboard option. Sorry, Steve Jobs, but I really don't want to type for any length of time on the iPad's keyboard.

2. Reading books. I always have a book going on the iPad, usually in the Kindle app. With the Kindle app, I can read my books on multiple devices, and they stay in sync, so when I start to read on one device, I pick up where I left off on another, a feature I really like. Right now I am reading  a book called Spies of the Balkans by Alan Furst on three devices: my computer, my iPhone and my iPad.

3. Reading magazines and newspapers. I downloaded the New York Times app and the Washington Post app. I also have the USA Today app on my iPad.

I have a lot of magazines on there too, but find I spend less time reading them on the iPad than I expected. As I've said before in this blog, magazines aren't working out that well for me on the iPad. While their interactive features are interesting and engaging, I usually save magazine reading for airplane trips. Unfortunately, you can't keep the Wifi on in most airplanes, so you lose the interactivity of many of the newer apps.

3. Watching TV I missed. I have a DVR, but sometimes I miss recording a program. If it's on ABC, I watch it on the ABC app. Otherwise, I "stream" it from Netflix. The Netflix app is free, but you do have to pay Netflix's monthly subscription fee, which lets you watch practically anything the company offers on demand. One caveat, however: if you start something on one device, like your computer, and then try to watch it on Netflix on the iPad, Netflix doesn't always hold your place.

4. Finding out tomorrow's weather. OK, I'll confess. We don't watch local news at night, so I'm often clueless about the forecast. It's easy to keep up with any one of the app store's weather apps.  This is The Weather Channel app that I use:

5. Playing Scrabble. This simply is one of the most addictive and fun apps out there. I play the "Solo" game, locking wits with the computer sometimes. Luckily, you can set how hard you want the computer to challenge you! Also, my husband and I "Pass and Play" taking a few turns each night before we fall into bed.So far we are pretty evenly matched although there was that one time he beat me by 100 points!

6. Looking up odd facts on Google. Google is great, and if you ever want to know what a word means or who that actor is in the old movie you are watching, Google is the place to go. I use the iPad app for finding out things on Google often.

7. Looking at my old pictures. I think the iPad is unsurpassed as a way to look through your old digital photo albums. It's just so easy to flip between pictures and the pictures look gorgeous on the device.

8. Checking Facebook---I'm not a big Facebook user, but I admit I go there almost every day to check in on people's updates and figure out what's happening with my far flung family.  The Facebook/iPhone app is easy to use and also makes putting in a status update quite easy

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What surprises me in all of this is the one thing I don't do much: surf the web. I like to use a bigger screen for that job, so when I'm looking at a lot of websites, I go to my computer. Also I don't create much using the iPad. I guess I never got past the rather hard-to-use keyboard.

Nevertheless, the iPad has eliminated the need for a laptop or netbook in our bedroom. I often ask myself if the iPad was worth the money, and my answer right now is "yes". Certainly it is a luxury gadget, but it's one that brings me pleasure and gets a lot of use.

If any of you have iPads, please let me know what you use yours for on a daily basis. It would be fun to compare notes.

Check out the EONs iPad Discussion Board, Boomers

I've been hanging out a little with the good folks at the iPad discussion board on EONs, a social networking site aimed at Boomers.

This is a Boomer to Boomer site,  so don't expect to find your kids or any member of the younger generation crowding around this social networking water cooler. What you get are some good, solid people who are trying out this new device just like you and me. They're smart and most of them are not techies. It's great to watch them as they handle this new toy.

The discussion board has a couple of more knowledgeable members who give technical answers when needed. Overall, it is a great laboratory for how Boomers will use this device and what the potential problems are with it. I recommend everyone go to the website and give it a read. You do have to join EONs first, but if you are interested in the pros and cons of the iPad for people our age, I definitely think you should do it.

The Boomers at EONs do a great deal with the iPad. They read books on the device, but they also are trying out all of the free apps that are available for it. One of these just happens to be for a comic book company, and users can download free comic books. One member of the group (for privacy purposes I won't name user names) finds comic books "better than on paper." He calls the graphics on the iPad screen "out of this world." That's something people really ought to know.

Streaming and viewing movies and video is also a favorite activity  reported by discussion group members. Working with a screen that is only 10 inches from your face, makes movies really come alive, they report. It's a personal, intimate, experience. Movies are downloaded through Netflix, and videos through a number of apps including YouTube. A couple of people on the board figured out how to make the iPad work with their TV without much fuss, so now they can stream movies, videos etc from the iPad onto the TV.


People here are very generous with their advice. They give lists of the best apps they've found. One of the ones mentioned is Stumbleupon, (www.stumbleupon.com) an app I've been meaning to discuss on this board. You can use Stumbleupon on your computer, smart phone or iPad and it does the same thing.

You select topics that are of interest to you and start stumbling though the web. My "Stumbles" have brought me to the website of the guy who does all those great chalk drawings and to pictures from someone who does unbelievable sand sculptures.

What you'll find depends on what topics you enter. This is a really fun way to surf the web and find things you never knew about.

Some of the Eons group have run into problems with their iPad: games that stall or are hard to make work after hours of playing; apps that let you download material but don't let you delete it; apps that don't look right on the iPad, clearly just brought over to the new platform directly from the iPhone; a keyboard that is clumsy to use. They've run into the device's limitations in real world scenarios. But for the most part they are an extremely enthusiastic bunch who don't believe that this will be a device that will end up on the trash heap.

Boomers, Want to watch TV online? Try a video search engine.

Like many other Boomers, I've begun watching some television online on my PC instead of on my TV. Maybe it's the lure of watching shows I've forgotten to record or the desire to try out a new show that leads me to want to watch in what I consider non-optimal conditions. Truly, watching on my computer screen isn't as satisfying an experience as watching in High Definition in my great room.

However, I think I have a problem that many others share. It's very hard to figure out where online you'll find the show you want to watch. And once you've decided what you want to watch, you may find you have to pay something to watch it. Not all television programming is available online either, so you may be out of luck all together.

I started my journey towards watching TV on my computer when I was having trouble with the cable signal for the channel that carried Lifetime. I wanted to watch my guilty secret (not any more) program, Project Runway. To find Project Runway episodes, I decided to Google the show.  Google wasn't much help.

Unfortunately, Project Runway used to be on Bravo and they are still carrying full episodes of past seasons. To find the NEW episodes I had to know which season this was and what network carried the show. With a little help, I figured out that season 7 was the current season. The website for the Lifetime network is called MyLifetime.com, which is not immediately evident.

Once you arrive at mylifetime.com, you can catch up with the last 5 episodes. I don't know why Episode 1, was unavailable, but it wasn't. Once on the site, was easy to start the video going and to use the controls to make it appear in  "full screen" mode. Lifetime includes some commercials in its replays, but they are not as long as the commercial breaks when you watch on TV.

Until this week, I had never tried to watch live TV. However, I thought it would be fun to see how to connect to the Olympics online. Of course, I knew that the Olympics was being broadcast by NBC. I have to say that going to the NBC website was a nightmare. I thought it was too busy and I was unable to locate "live" programming. Here is a screen shot of the website. There was lots of information on the web page. It just wasn't organized very well.

A friend of mine told me that I should look for old TV shows on iTunes, and sure enough there are plenty of TV shows for sale from Apple. You can download them, free or for a fee, and you have 24 hours to watch them.

Also, there are many episodes of TV shows available on Hulu.com, including five episodes of the popular Burn Notice. YouTube also features TV shows. If you know what you are looking for, you can search for it through YouTube's search feature. It may or may not be there. And that's the problem.











No one knows how to find these shows online. Supposed you want to watch the latest episode of American Idol on your computer. If you type into Google something like "American Idol 2010 episodes online free" you'll get a lot of answers, but none of them are very good.

Finally, I decided to try to find a video search engine. That led me to "Clicker," which seems to be an easy to use way to find the TV shows you want to watch. A quote on the website from Readwrite Web calls this "the TV Guide of Internet Television."

You may be disappointed to find that you'll have to pay for some of them, but at least you'll know  where to get them. For example, Big Love, an HBO product, has to be downloaded from Amazon, YouTube or Netflix. Each has a different pricing model.

Another video search engine that seems to work for TV is called Truveo.

Yet another good site for video search is Blinkx.

Some of these search engine sites look clean and easy to understand on the first page, but once you click through, you think "this is more trouble than it's worth." Give these TV search engines a try and see if you agree with me. Or perhaps you know some better TV search engines I could try.

Boomers are starting to watch TV on their laptops and computers, for sure. Now we have to ask for the tools that will make this easy to do!