An interesting point was brought up by Macworld’s Jason Snell regarding writing on the iPad. Does it improve your concentration and the quality of your writing? Considering that you can’t have multiple things displayed at once, and it’s difficult to place an important bit of work in a folder and forget about it, it might well be true.
Snell:
Using the iPad slowed me down and got me to think about what I was writing in a way that using my trusty MacBook Air never would.
[…]
The changes in writing environment go beyond the act of typing. The iPad also offers a remarkable lack of distractions. When I write on my Mac I find I am endlessly checking Twitter and email and my weather station’s current conditions page and anything else I can find to distract myself from the difficult task of putting one word in front of another.
[…]
If I’m about to write something for publication, I now seriously consider the iPad every time.
In my experience, I’d definitely agree about the concentration and focus part. YouTube is such a distraction for me on my Mac, whereas on the iPad it’s a lot harder to get at and above all it isn’t in the background.
However I would say that for me, the typing speed you lose on the iPad isn’t acceptable. So while I would definitely use the iPad occasionally for essays and articles (and have been doing so), to have it as my main machine for word processing is a step too far. What do you think?
