Whopity's comment made me smile - I can fully understand it.
The Ipad is very good at what it does out of the box, and usually a right PITA at everything else.
It is not a "computer"; it is a media player, web browser, a box for reading emails and for writing one-line ones back, and for running the few 3rd party apps that are actually very good. The vast majority of the shop apps are crap, crippled one trick horses, and trivia.
The massively reduced literacy on forums is the result of so many people posting with Iphones and Ipads
If you can do all you need with an Ipad then you have a great solution. The build quality is good by consumer IT standards (although in our family, with an Iphone4, we have thus far had a 100% failure rate on Apple stuff), the battery life is great, and the finger interface is unmatched. The screen is pretty bright.
We originally bought it for the question bank on the JAA IR ground school, and it is superb for that. Lie on the sofa with it and bang away at the questions...
One needs the £25 matt screen filter to make it daylight usable. I got one from Amazon.
The Apple/Itunes backup process works really well, and an app you buy can be installed on several devices. The minus side is that you cannot just download apps elsewhere.
I have found the GPS to be of crap reliability in flight (superb on the ground, when moving slowly) but it works OK with the XGPS150 bluetooth unit (another gadget to keep charged, so I don't bother with it).
One can't run Afpex on it, nor any other app (or a website) that needs Java client. There are ways to run Afpex (
example) but they are obscure to say the least (various forms of remote desktop) and the performance is poor unless you are on wifi or have very good 3G.
It has various issues which are well known: incompatibility with many (what Apple call "legacy") wifi access points (I gather it throws away the DHCP every 10 seconds, which fools many routers), cannot make up its mind between GPRS/3G and wifi if both offer a similarly poor signal level (and tends to prefer wifi, without realising that nowadays nearly all unencrypted wifi APs are pay-to-use commercial ones), no indication of whether it is using the internal GPS or an external one.
I am waiting for Oziexplorer to come out for IOS because that will open up the range of maps one can run on it. Currently, you have only the really crappy Memory Map which runs only QCT and its latest version "upgrade" removed the option to upload your old QCTs
So I am staying with the old MM version.
I haven't jailbroken it yet. Did the Iphone4. A JB is handy in some respects e.g. dropping data files directly into the app's Docs directory, but while a JB exposes the file system fully, Apple have concealed most of it by using obscure numeric directory names so unless you are a dedicated hacking forum follower you won't know what is what. One can use Iphone Explorer for a lot of drag/drop stuff though, even without a JB.