Saturday 26 March 2011

iPad


The iPad 2 isn’t a radical departure from the original iPad, as you might have figured out by now. What the iPad 2 is, however, is a much more refined product. Things that weren’t possible with the first iPad have now been featured front and center — a front and rear-facing camera, a thinner and lighter body, a more tapered design — and it just works beautifully together. Apple’s use of high quality materials combined with its ingenious engineering and manufacturing have yielded the sexiest tablet in the world. I haven’t seen anything that comes close to being as well put together as the iPad 2.
This time around, two color choices are available, and there’s another choice in the crowd — the choice of two carriers — as the iPad 2 with Wi-Fi + 3G comes in either AT&T (GSM) or Verizon Wireless (CDMA) varieties. Combine this with the fact that there are three capacity options and you have 18 different iPad 2 configurations. Once you have settled in on the storage capacity you think you’ll need, you move on to what carrier (if any) you’d like on your iPad 2, and finally what color tablet you want to take home. I used both a white and black 64GB AT&T iPad 2 on and off over the course of a week, and I eventually settled on the white model. My iPhone 4 doesn’t match and I’m not thrilled about the back of the device featuring black components (the top antenna cover is black, the Apple logo is black, and both the volume and mute buttons are black), but for me, white was the more appealing color choice. The screen most certainly disappears more in the black model, though for me, the white iPad 2 blended in better in my environment, and the black iPad was almost too dark if you’ve used a white unit.
The iPad 2 features a brand new Apple A5 dual-core 1GHz processor, 512MB of RAM (up from 256MB), an enormous battery (it’s actually three put together), and up to nine times the graphics performance of the original model. In my testing, the iPad 2 performed wonderfully well — easily a noticeable difference from the original unit, especially with gaming and when launching resource-hungry apps. Web browsing with the iPad 2 and iOS 4.3 absolutely screams, and it makes for an almost desktop-like experience… aside from the lack of Adobe Flash support, obviously.
Apps launch instantly, games perform in an almost console-like way, and every task is lightning fast without hesitation. It feels like you’re speeding at 150MPH at 3:00 a.m. on an open highway — the only limit is on you. Nothing I have used, not one device, has performed as well as the iPad 2 for the everyday tasks it affords.