I’m writing this in the middle of a field somewhere within the Exmoor National Park. The campsite that my wife and I are staying at has complementary WIFI and I can just about see the wireless signal even though I’m a few hundred metres away from the repeater – which is cool. Having now used my iPad in the wild I’d thought it might be a good idea to share my experiences.
Charging
The iPad is famed for having a long battery life, but it doesn’t stretch to a week, especially if you have the screen bright to contend with daylight. I have been using a power inverter which plugs into the 12V socket of my car and presents a UK 3 pin socket. This gives the iPad the necessary 2A to charge at speed and is far more effective than using a 12V to iPod dock connector cable.
These inverters are available on Amazon and I’d recommend that you spend the extra and get one that is capable of 150W as this could also charge a laptop.
Consumption
We’ve mostly used the iPad for watching films in the tent before heading to bed. The iPad excels at this but in the future I’ll be looking to sacrifice image quality for quantity. With apps I’m hard pressed to get more than 5 films on my iPad and downloading them as required can be very time consuming so when using Handbrake I will be tweaking the settings to get higher levels of compression.
Whilst just in range of a WIFI signal (there’s no 3G out here) I’m happily using Flipboard as my main source of social media and RSS content. When the connection fails Flipboard caches some of the content so I can skim read the headlines. I’ll be investigating offline reading tools for future expeditions as will not always be so lucky to have a WIFI signal.
Offline
Not all apps are happy with being offline. WordPress for instance just points out that there is no active Internet connection and doesn’t seem to allow you to write offline – boo. It’s for this reason that I’ve been using Notes to capture my thoughts as this is not too fussy about your connection status and will sync to iCloud at a later date to suit.
Conclusion
Great battery life, portability and dazzlingly bright screen means that the iPad is perfectly suited to life in the field and I expect to be getting more use from mine across the fields of the UK.
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