Review: IPad 2 from Apple

One year ago Apple launched the first Ipad, Ipad1 was a device that broke new ground, over the years a lot of influential figures including Bill gates tried to push the tablet technology with no success.

It took the greatest salesman in the technology  industry who had the vision, the means and the patience to build such a well made device to fruition to make it work.

Most of us in the business snickered a little when Jobs talked about a revolutionary and magical device but 20 million unit sales later no has doubts anymore. If you visited the latest consumer electronics show in January in Vegas you could see that all the manufacturers brought tablets including business facing companies like Cisco and Research in motion (Blackberry maker).

So what was so special in the iPad that worked?

First of all it looks fantastic, the metal finish and the heft it has sends a message of quality, by its nature the iPad is always on, which means you surf the net, read your emails or read a book withing seconds from picking it up.
There is no need for Anti viruses and firewalls and updates and all the things that drive non technological people away from the PC. The iPad is so intuitive that a 60 year old grandmother and a 5 year old kid can learn to use it within minutes.

The second thing that made it appeal so much was the amount of content that came with it in the initial launch. The competitors that came later all learned the technology part and brought faster and even better looking devices but none of the content.

Sure you can surf the web on the Motorola Xoom and you can use Facebook or read a book, but without all the apps and the content from the itunes store you are basically left with a huge phone.
Games like angry birds may scale nicely but the difference between that one and infinity blade or real racing HD 2 is enormous.

One of the biggest advantages of a tablet are the digital magazines, applications Like Zite and Flipboard allow you to aggregate data from twitter and Facebook and many other sources into a beautiful digital magazine that you can flip through and get the pictures and videos from the links without clicking each link.
This two applications alone are worth buying the iPad for in my opinion.

One other big difference is the quality and eye for detail, Companies like Motorola think they can launch a tablet and tell you that you can't use the card reader at launch, or that flash support will not be ready for a while, or that in order to get 4g support you will have to send the tablet back for up to a week to replace the part. This just scares away normal people who want a simple solution and not a lot of techno mumbo jumbo of why they don't get the full range of capabilities that they were promised.

Nerds sometimes prefer devices you can fiddle with, we like customized ROMs and sophisticated widgets which are all good and well, but we are not the target audience that Steve Jobs had in mind. He dreamt of a post PC era where the tablet can replace the PC for all the consumption part of  the computer. an easy intuitive device that you don't need any knowledge to use, a device for the kitchen and living room just as much as it is for work.

Now we are one year later, Steve Jobs takes the stage again, we knew he will talk about a dual core CPU, we knew there will be two cameras and for all that the competition was ready.
What they were not ready for was how much thinner and lighter it will be, those were the two major complaints against the first iPad and Apple like apple they listen to their audience and if its economical and within their vision they make the effort and fix it.

Apple closed an ~8 billion dollar deal for parts which also allowed them to keep the current price even after all the upgrades. The average consumer asks himself why would I pay more for a new and flawed device while the incumbent leader is cheaper and has better content? there is no precedent in consumer electronics that a challenger asks for a higher price than the current market leader.

The biggest shock to the competitors was the difference in weight and height, A Samsung exec was quoted as saying "we need to get back to the drawing board" or something similar to that effect.

We have to give Samsung credit they did manage to launch a new tablet withing a month that will be just as thin and light which is a testimony to how agile and competent the guys at Samsung are, but it will not be enough.

The reason it won't be enough is because Google doesn't provide the added value needed to dethrone Apple, Google failed to bring on the major content providers from apple to Google, we got some of the games but none of the Magazines and none of the choice and richness of content that Apple has in the appstore.
Unless Google spends money to lure application devs of applications like Instagram, Flipboard, Zite and others, the Android tablets will be bought mostly By tech people and idealistic people who hate the absence of flash and the walled garden attitude of apple.

 The majority of consumers, the moms and dads who want an easy to use experience and lots of apps will buy the iPad, and guess which population is bigger?

I will be the first to admit I am not a fan of the walled garden approach, and I would like to be able to copy files to my device and play movies without having to convert them and so on and so forth.

That is why my next phone will be an android phone, but in my tablet I need superior battery life and easy of use when I work on it. after all that introduction lets talk about the device itself.

Hardware:

• Apple A5 dual core processor clocking at 1GHZ
• 9.7 inch IPS Screen with 1024*768 resolution
• 512 MB of RAM (probably)
• Internal storage ranging from 16GB to 64GB depends on model.
• 0.34 inches thick
• 1.33 pounds weight
• Bluetooth 2.1
• Rear camera of 1 MP with 720p Video capabilities, VGA front camera.
• Wireless adapter with b/g/n support.
• Cellular modem for the relevant 3G models.

The hardware is not the real story of the iPad as I said before, and still it is very impressive. when you surf huge websites with a lot of content you can feel the difference when scrolling down, you don't get the checkered page anymore.
We still don't have games and apps designed to utilize all the extra horsepower under the hood but I am sure they are on the way.

The cameras on the Ipad 2 are just horrendous, in day light they are bad, in low light they are washed and grainy and just unusable.
Don't plan on using them for nothing outside of video conference or the occasional times when you are using your iPad and it will take too much time to unlock the iPhone before the beautiful bird fly away or something like that :-)
Because of the decreased weight I can now read for a lot longer time and hold it much easier with one hand, which was an effort with iPad1.

Because of the angles in the new design the 30 pin connector to the PC and the power button are tougher to use and many times I found myself muttering some choice words about johnny ives and his group while turning the iPad over to locate the power button.
The new HDMI adapter allows you to mirror the display to your TV and not just video, which is very handy although a bit pricy for a piece of plastic. all in all top notch hardware.

iPad 1 on top of iPad 2

 Here are photos taken with the rear camera:

Here is a photo taken with the front camera:

Software:

The new iPad launched with a new operating system version (4.3) and included several exclusive new applications. The First one is iMovie for video editing, iMovie works flawlessly, it is versatile and makes good use of the touch screen. In my opinion it is better and more intuitive than its sister on the Mac, you can easily create movies or slide shows and it allows for easy sharing to social networks, email or YouTube.

Here is a movie I edited on the iPad:

Another application that came with iPad 2 is Photo booth, unlike iMovie it is a lot less usable than its sister app on the Mac, it basically looks like it was thrown in as a gift for use with the camera, its basically just 9 filers you can use to take a picture, there are far better camera apps on the appstore that do it better and much much more.

The last major application that was added was Garage band (works on iPad 1 to a lesser degree) its the software you can use to virtually play music instrument and mix it all together to create great songs or sound tracks for your videos.
Unlike its sister app on the mac it is easy to use, and amazingly intuitive to play with on the touch screen. Garage band was born for the touch screen, withing 5-10 minutes of play you can create a passable sound track for your slide show, it is really hard to express how great it is without showing you stuff that might be copy protected so I can't. I will just say that it is what is considered a killer app, and if you like this kind of stuff it will be worth buying the iPad just for it alone.

The true greatness of the iPad for me is the magazine programs, I will show you just a few examples, Here is a magazine app called Zite that collects data based on areas of interest, look how beautiful it is to follow:

Another killer app is Flipboard, it does the same thing as Zite but also collects posts from Facebook and twitter into a beautiful easy to follow magazine:

The games on the iPad look spectacular, My favorite example is Infinity blade, every time I show it to an android fan boy he stays with his mouth open, same goes for Real racing HD 2.

Wrap up:

iPad is just a great device to own, if you already have iPad 1 and the cameras and extra software are not your cup of tea you can wait another year to upgrade. if you are in the market for a new tablet Apple is better by leaps and bounds from its android competitors for now. the changes in android's tablet OS (Honeycomb) are impressive but the lack of software is just too costly to the experience. the only Tablet that has any true added value is the HTC EVO View 4G, which does introduce true added value with its scribe technology, still remains to be seen just how impressive it really is in real life.

Bottom line: I can full heartedly recommend buying the iPad 2.