Sleeping with the enemy (or one week on with the iPad 2)
Posted: April 2nd, 2011 | Author: RyanMacG | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: iOS, iPad, tech | No Comments »As most of you know I have been somewhat critical of Apple’s mobile efforts in the past and fairly fanboy-ish in my defence of Android, this left some shocked that I decided to endure 7 hours of queueing to go get an iPad 2 last Friday.
There are some very simple reasons for this:
- I’m not 100% convinced that Android 3.0 is really ready for primetime
- As of writing this the Xoom from Motorola is still not due for release in the UK for at least another week.
- I’ve actually been impressed with the way iPad apps have sprung up at a fast pace over the past year
- The iPad fits with what I want from a tablet at the moment
This shouldn’t be seen as me justifying the purchase but more as a brief explanation to those that were confused.
The rest of this post if a general review of how I’ve found it after this first week.
The Good
Firstly the display, while not the same quality as it’s smaller retina screen bedecked counterparts the iPad screen is pretty much gorgeous. It has terrific viewing angles and it’s really pleasant to watch movies and play games on it. The overall device speed is also fairly impressive. While I’m sure it’ll be outdone by Android tablets over the next year it’s snappy, responsive and games run at a decent pace with little to no stuttering. (Those that do stutter most likely require further optimisation)
The keyboard; nicely spaced, which makes typing things out in landscape mode really pleasant. (essentially just a keyboard otherwise.)
The apps; as you can see in the image above I’ve actually written this entire post on the iPad and rotated all the images using “Photoshop Express” it’s actually as simple if not simpler than carrying out the whole thing on a PC and importing the screenshots.
Gestures; Technically this isn’t in the options that come with the iPad but a quick fiddle in Xcode means that I can use multitouch gestures to navigate my way round iOS. These can be viewed at this link. They can be a little fiddly and it takes a while to get used to not using the home button but for a feature that’s technically unreleased they’re pretty neat.
The Smart Cover; it seems fairly obvious that someone else should have thought of it before but they didn’t and it’s awesome. End of.
The Not So Good
The cameras; it’s been gone over quite a bit elsewhere but basically the cameras are terrible for still photography but that’s fine to be honest I’ll use this for video occasionally because I can use iMovie natively but it’s not really the best device to use as a camera.
The Ugly
Non iPad apps; this sucked on the first iPad and still sucks. Loads of really odd apps aren’t really suited for the iPad, Spotify for instance, so these display the iPhone version at regular size with the option to scale them up 2x. They don’t look pleasant and aren’t particularly nice to use either, although that’s not really Apple’s fault.
Notifications; coming from the rather unobtrusive Android notifications the ones one iOS are still fairly terrible, hopefully this will be fixed this year in iOS 5 but it’s another small niggle.
Pics
