Will an iPad work for us??

timeou

I'm considering getting an iPad 2 for my children for xmas but have a few questions.

I have a 15gb internet allowance each month using a 3 dongle (we tend to use about 10 -12gb of that with computing and son on xbox live) - will downloading the iPad apps eat into this allowance massively?

I know my son will need a laptop for secondary school next year and I understand the iPad is not the ideal thing for students to do homework on. What really do people use them for? Is it just surfing the web / listening to music and watching movies?

What type of apps are available that would be good for the children - and are they expensive!!

Cheers!

k9387

Apps won't really eat into your allowance, most are only a few mb each, rising to a few 100 mb for games and the biggest ones running at around 1 gb. Remember that the iPad is only 16/32/64 gb so your not going to have much room to download too.

I use mine for general web browsing, email, magazines and books, plus the odd game.

I've tried using it for work but have been unhappy with all the note taking apps i have tried and the office apps are substandard compared to their computer counterparts.

I have seen some good interactive book style apps for the solar system, periodic table, etc - but these cost £10 each, contain very little info compared to a book and you could get much more info for free on the web.

markfj

I'd say ipads are good, for the things you suggested, browsing, emails, music, photos etc, but not anywhere near as advanced as a PC

There are tons of apps, found here just for example http://www.apple.com/ipad/from-the-app-store/ so sure there will be some to meed your needs, some are free and some you pay for, generally they are not expensive though!

boxst

The iPad is great at browsing the web and consuming content. The content can be movies, books, games and even spreadsheets and word processing documents. I also use mine to download email from work and respond quickly (although mostly I use an iPhone for that).

There are now so many applications that you will probably find one to do almost anything.

I still wouldn't recommend it for a secondary school student though. Creating the spreadsheets or documents and especially presentations is a complete pain.

As mentioned above the applications are usually not that expensive and quite small to download,

Steve

timeou

Thank you all for your helpful replies xx

k9387

I would also say that iPad at secondary school = target.