Short Review - Pages for iPad

So here I am, drafting a blog post using Apple's Pages application for iPad; it is undoubtedly a good app, as far as it goes, but it's not quite all I had hoped for. For a word processor at the cheap end of the market (£5.99, to be precise, although that's fairly expensive in iPad app terms) it's very good but with some unfortunate feature holes that rather reduce it's usefulness.

For example, there's no way (as far as I can tell) to add a hyperlink to a document except by including the URL (for example http://myryama.blogspot.com), which is a little inelegant. Exporting the document (assuming that you don't want to use iTunes) requires that you either email it (in Pages, Word or PDF formats) or share it via iWork; an option to save to the cloud (MobileMe, Dropbox etc.) seems like an obvious omission for a portable Internet device. To export to iWork you will need an active Internet connection, so don't expect to be able to hit share on the plane and have your document appear in iWork as you wander out through the terminal building (this might be fixed in iOS 4 when multi-tasking becomes available, but who knows?).

So, given these problems, what's so good about the app? Firstly, it's very easy to use. The controls are simple and logical; positioning elements (photos, shapes, tables etc) on the page is straightforward and intuitive (although precise placement is sometimes tricky as the train bounces along); formatting features and options allow for the creation of presentable documents; icons and general functionality conform to expected (ie Microsoft Word) norms; file management, including autosave, is simple (although the apparent lack of a folder structure might prove tricky once the number of documents grows large).

Overall, it's worth investigating if you want to do more than capture plain text (mail, Evernote or Notebook will do that for free) and you need to be able to create new, rather than edit existing, documents. The weak file-sharing features mean that syncing documents with a PC or Mac isn't going to happen and this could be a killer problem if your intended workflow requires editing in both mobile and fixed environments. Pages is not without its weaknesses, of course, but as long as you want to create and export new documents they are (probably) manageable inconveniences rather than compromising faults.