My ever present iPad

The iPad goes everywhere with me

It doesn't matter which room of the house I am going to, I always have my iPad with me. Just so long as I am within Wi-Fi range I'm always connected. I am tempted that with my next iPad I buy, I will get one with 3G connectivity. There is a difference of around about €120 with the 3G connected iPad, but I think it could be well worth getting. I will be waiting until the next revision of the iPad mini and I will choose whether to get a full size iPad or whether to go for the iPad mini.

Telling my iPad what to do!

One other things that I really find handy, is to use the dictation service as much as possible. I know that some people do complain about how the service works, but I find it works really well for me. Sometimes there will be a sentence where there are one or two words that are incorrect and I can just select them and manually correct them. The trick is to always make sure that you read back what you have dictated into your document. As long as you speak clearly and take your time, the accuracy is really quite impressive. With practice, you will find that using dictation on your iPad or your iPhone is much faster than typing. I know that I really wish I had the dictation service available to me on my iPhone 4. Well, I do have the DragonDictate dictation application which does work fairly well. But it would be better if it was built in so that I could use it in more applications natively.

Well, somebody has to come from Birmingham!

In some ways it is a surprise that dictation should work so well for me because I have an accent from Birmingham in the Midlands of England. Usually I find that there are one or two words that the service will get confused with that I have to repeat and say a little bit more clearly.

Difficult places for dictation

The only problem with dictation is that there are certain places where it is not possible to dictate to your computer. This will either be in a noisy room where you can't be heard properly by the iPad or it will be in a quiet room where are the people are working and expect to have silence. Another possibility of where you might not be able to dictate is when you are writing something that needs to be kept private. If you're using the earbuds with the microphone for the dictation then you will find that even a noisy room you can actually dictate effectively.

The way that I use the dictation is to clearly speak what I want the dictation service to convert into text, usually one sentence at a time. I read the sentence back and see if there are any words that are incorrect. I will then double tap the word to select it and then either re dictate the word as I want it or I will type it in manually. I find that this process is quick and efficient.