Lo and Behold! The much awaited gadget of the year – iPad 2, the second generation iPad was launched two days back and has put a full stop to all kinds of speculations about it. Steve Jobs (who still looks unwell) was clad in his trademark black turtleneck and blue Jeans to unveil the latest pride to the apple family.Being gadget freaks, that we are, we had our own set of expectations towards the next generation of this wonder gadget and was waiting eagarly to see how it was different from the generation 1 ipad.
For all those who are still saying, this is a redundant piece of gadget which is just tossed in the market to do what an iphone / laptop does, consider this – Will you want to take your laptop out every time you travel to watch a movie / presentation or would you rather prefer a tab? If you are answering that you’ll just be fine with a iPhone / smart phone my answer is this – I prefer to fly emirates rather than any other flight for just one reason – the in flight personal entertainment screen is by far the biggest among all the other international airlines. The name of the game is portability!
Lets get back to the iPad2 and its features:
Appearance and Aesthetics:
* Lighter and Thinner than the previous iPad version – 8.8 mm thick which is 35% lesser than iPad and weighs 1.3 lbs
* 9.7 inch screen (There were a lot of speculations that iPad 2 was shrinking to a 7 inch screen – thankfully this speculation was wrong)
* LED backlit, multi touch display with Finger print resistant oleophobic coating – in short the same as in iPad. With iPhone 4 in circulation with Retina display, I almost 99% believed the speculation that iPad 2 was getting retina display as well. Really disappointed here.
Hardware Features:
* A5 processor (Dual core) with 1 GHz speed
* iOS 4.3
* 9 times better graphics than previous version
* 10 hr battery (inbuilt again)
* Dual Camera
- Rear camera is good – has video recording capacity of 720p HD at 30 fps.
- Front cam-VGA (WTH! who uses VGA these days? Even iPhone4 has 1.2MP front cam)
* Bluetooth 2.1
* Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n
* HDMi Port (the only worthy enhancement) – charge as you watch when connected to TV
Usability Features:
* In built new Photobooth App for photo modification
* Facetime enabled
* Stream media over network
* HSUPA – Uploads over 3G gets faster and better
Price:
The product is priced same as the iPad. But some better sense has prevailed that those who got a new iPad within the past 14 days are eligible to get a $100 refund as the previous versions prices have been slashed down. This was something that I liked!
| Size | Wi-Fi only | Wi-Fi & 3G |
| 16 GB | $499 | $629 |
| 32 GB | $599 | $729 |
| 64 GB | $699 | $829 |
iPad2 will be released to US users on 11th March. UK user can experience iPad2 from 25th March and just as was the case with iPad gen1, India has no dates yet (I hope it does not take 8 months like iPad)
The Disappointments:
No Retina Display
May be this will be incorporated in iPad 3
No SD Card Slot
Well this was mostly expected as Apple markets with price slabs corresponding to its internal memory size and having a SD card will beat that purpose. Nevertheless, it would have been a delight to have had the feature
No USB / mini USB
I still can’t see why Apple doesn’t have this. It is a pain to keep syncing only using itunes. I hope the designers get this in place in iPad3
No Near Field Communication (NFC)
Come on!!! Android 2.3 has this. Is apple trying to compete with Honeycomb or not?
No 4G
With 4G being the next in-thing, I can’t accept iPad 2 doesn’t have it already.
To me this release of iPad seems to be way before what their actual schedule must have been. It misses most of the features that most of us were nearly 99% sure it’d have. Not sure if it was pushed before its time just so that Steve Jobs can present it to the world himself (?!) When Steve said that iPad2 was going to get the other designers ‘back to their drawing boards again’, I found it hard to believe as I see much better features and display aspects in its competitors. Well, if iPad 2 still emerges the winner among its contemporaries, it'll purely be due to the ‘Apple’ brand power.
So what do you think? Are you happy with the iPad 2 or would you have not minded to wait few more months to have all the other features included in it (like me)
1 comment:
I like my iPad 2 very much because it takes the things I do every day and makes them extraordinary.
Post a Comment