New iPad – love the screen, not the salmon
I signed for my new iPad at precisely 8:02:24 yesterday morning according the the delivery docket. I might not have been the first in the world to get hold of an iPad 3 (and, yes, that’s what I’m going to call it in spite of Apple’s weirdness about the naming), but I can certainly claim to have been an over-achiever in the getting-your-hands-on-an-iPad stakes. And I didn’t even have to queue up.
So was it worth it? Absolutely.
I’m not convinced I would have been happy to have upgraded from an iPad 2, but the jump from my old first generation iPad to the latest one is huge. In particular the screen is the thing. I read books, magazines and newspapers on my iPad and with the new screen the words look as good, if not better, than they do on paper. Photos look just stunning: I sat mesmerised by the detail in a photo of Bob Carr in the Herald this morning. And, really, that’s not something I thought I’d ever say.
Apart from the screen the other differences are minimal in my view. There’s an overall better speed and sleekness to the iPad 3 and there are features which iPad 2 owners would be used to but which are novel for me – things like the cameras. I can’t say I’m enormously fussed about them though.
I liked the concept of being able to do dictation instead of typing on the iPad, as my fumbling fingers have never found the iPad’s keyboard ideal. But out of the box, the dictation just doesn’t like my accent. The last sentence of the previous paragraph “I can’t say I’m enormously fussed about them though.” came out of the dictation as “I can’t salmon norms he fussed about the boat.” Enough said.