So after a few days enjoying my iPad as a handy net-connected toy – and it’s very good at that, honest – I decide to try and do some work on it. Nothing fancy. Just reading a manuscript and marking it up with some annotations and scribbles.

Let me emphasise. I don’t see the iPad as a writing tool. Even hooked up to the Apple Bluetooth keyboard I still have hanging around here from my Mac days. It’s too clunky and simple for me. I don’t want a lot of a word processor. But I do want more than the very basic features I've seen on this thing so far.

No, just a nice reading environment and the ability to make some notes on a manuscript. Not a lot to ask, is it? Well actually, as it turns out…. yes.

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The obvious way to try to do this would be through something that can open the Word file directly and insert a few comments. Documents to Go on my Android phone can do that. I forked out £9.99 for DTG on the iPad -- and it can't do comments. Nor can Apple's Pages app (£5.99 thank you very much, and a pretty poor piece of work that is). With Android you get to return apps that don't do what you want and get your money back within 24 hours. With the iPad you fork out -- and that's it. No wonder so many apps are a bit short on information about what they can actually do.

So, dealing directly with a Word file is out of the question as far as I can see. How about we read and annotate in a book reader file instead? If you own Kindle hardware you can upload a doc file to the Amazon site, have it converted then sent back to you. That way you can annotate it on the Kindle itself, or through the Kindle app on Windows, Mac, Android...

There's a Kindle app for the iPad. Can you annotate your own documents on that? No. In order to do so you need to be able to place the Kindle file manually, and iPad won't let you see inside its file system to do that. I forked out £5.99 for something called Air Sharing HD that said it would let you copy files to and from the iPad. It will, but only to a documents folder, and iPad won't open Kindle files automatically. Another waste of money. Another avenue closed.

How about iBooks, Apple's own book reader? Yes, you can get your own documents on there. First you save them as html. Then you import them into the free app <a href="http://calibre-ebook.com/" target="_blank">Calibre</a>. Then you drag them into iTunes. Then you sync. After all that hassle iBooks is a very neat app, and lets you enter typed notes easily. Unfortunately it doesn't appear to sync the changed iBooks file back to the Mac when you sync again. You can't see where the file is stored on the iPad of course. To do this you have to buy another piece of software just to transfer your epub book back to your computer.

And when you do you'll find your annotations have disappeared. Lord knows where Apple stores them but it doesn't seem to be inside the book itself.

OK -- let's try a pdf file. That works, after a fashion. Apps like iAnnotate and Notify let you read a pdf file and add notes to it. It's clunky. You don't see just your text you see headers and footers on every page. There's that file problem again. I can't quite believe how difficult it is to get files off and onto the iPad. Are Apple serious? Lots of things don't work too -- in iTunes or using services that came with the apps. I found it easier to upload and download through Dropbox which can take forever.

Notify seemed the slickest. But when you export out of Notify back to pdf it turns the whole document into a single, gigantic image. So my pdf file went from 4mb to 45mb, became incredibly unwieldy, and utterly uneditable as a pdf. Massive fail (and I wish I could get my money back for that one).

So after half a day and a fair bit of wasted cash I'm out of options really. Yes, you can read your work very nicely on the iPad. I suspect my preferred option, given that Kindle won't work, would be to read it in iBooks, make notes, and then have the iPad next to me while I did the revision on the PC in Word. But what a lot of messing. Why do Apple have to make things so hard? Why can't you see your files? Do they realise how primitive this will  look when Android tablets come along and make everything so much easier? You could do it all easily with DTG on an Android tablet -- and just transfer files by having your tablet plugged in as an external drive, as I can with my phone now.

Want to know how reading a manuscript on a tablet should look? Like this...

[wpvideo xd95wKGH]

I really haven't used this thing in this way before so I've a lot to learn. But as you can see from this you can...
<ul>
	<li>View the document in draft view, without headers or footers</li>
	<li>Change the actual text if need be with a virtual keyboard</li>
	<li>Scribble and highlight with a pen</li>
</ul>
None of which is very easy on the iPad as far as I can work out. What is this? My laptop, an 11.6 inch Packard Bell Butterfly Touch, running standard Microsoft Word. It's a Windows 7 tablet. You simply turn round the screen to get rid of the keyboard. Normally it looks like this.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/125642-packard-bell-easynote-butterfly-touch-ev-006uk-7012.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-6050" title="125642-packard-bell-easynote-butterfly-touch-ev-006uk-7012" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/125642-packard-bell-easynote-butterfly-touch-ev-006uk-7012.jpg" alt="" width="490" height="257" /></a>

So I can both write <em>and</em> revise using this. It's actually a very nice keyboard. Since I sync my work files using the free Windows Live Sync service it means I can work on the original from my desktop and have all changes synced back automatically to it. No conversions. No extra software. It just works (isn't Apple supposed to be like that?)

Cost? You can pick this up for around £499 or a touch more. About the price of the cheapest iPad.

Don't get me wrong. As a handy coffee table toy the iPad is very nice -- though somewhat overpriced it seems to me. As a book revision tool... nah. At least not for this writer. I'll stick to the laptop, thank you.