#484 Should I buy the iPad? 31 Janvier 2010

Mac

After 3 years of rumors, Apple announced the iPad during the Wednesday's event: a mac tablet based on iPhone / iPod touch ideology. With a larger screen, the graphical environment is following the rule: plug and play. Sounds promising but should I buy it?

During the previous year, Apple impressed by all their products. They redesigned and rethought almost all multimedia supports with their personal note: Macbook Air is the finest laptop in the world, the iPod Touch is the thinness multimedia-player, the iPhone the easiest phone to use. The events coverage and the success of their products definitively boosted their sales which secures their market.

Now, they're bringing the iPad, an ultra-transportable tablet capable to synchronize your emails, to surf on internet and to use all iPhone/iPod applications. The starting price is $499 (16Gb, no 3G). Nice complement: plugins are already available and will be helpful to import pictures from your camera's card.

Autonomy

I have a brand new iPod Touch. It's supposed to have an incredible autonomy. Reality differs. Listening music: 20 hours (instead of 30), reading videos: 2 hours (instead of 4), playing video games: about one hour and a half (n/a) and internet browsing: about one hour of intense use (n/a). These values are not accurate, it's just a personal finding.

The iPad is supposed to have an autonomy around 10 hours for common use. Due to my previous experiences, it should be around 6 to 8 hours.

Surfing

The best asset of this tablet is the availability of WiFi and 3G. These 2 technologies allow you to surf from everywhere with a sufficient bandwidth. If you're in your kitchen and you would like to cook something, you surf, you find, you follow the recipe.

The browser Safari has lot of capabilities. It can read almost all kinds of content (feeds, images, pdf). It's one of the best solution available. Firefox and Opera doesn't know how to read many documents without an external plugin.

Read a book

Have you tried to read a book with your laptop? It's very extremely difficult to concentrate. The backlights are finally very disturbing. If you think you can read a full book on your iPad, you might have a strong surprise.

The E Ink brand electronic paper display used in Amazon Kindle is solving this problem. If you've never had the chance to try one, you should. The product is simply designed but provides a great user experience.

Unless you want to have a cookbook which doesn't require hours of reading, I might not recommend the use of the iPad to such purpose.

Emails

When are you reading your mails? Different situations:

• Public transportations: the iPad is huge and the screen is glossy. If you have some sun, you might have lot of difficulties to read.
• At home: my place is a one bedroom apartment. All I need is to go to my room to see my mails ...

However, using the iPad for your mails has good perks: the virtual keyboard is fast, the correcting system is often accurate, you can plug a real keyboard, the large screen is great to avoid mistakes and it allows you to read your mails form everywhere.

iWork

Reading iWork files already works on the iPod/iPhone and I don't really see the interest to update files directly. To me, advanced text editors are about details of presentation. So, I definitively will have to try it to see how good it is.

Also, I hope more typefaces will be available.

Video games

A PSP has a very short autonomy (mine is about 7 hours of playing). Do you really expect the iPad to be better?

Last word

Even if I am an Apple fan, this new product does not retain my attention. The price is high and it's a first generation (we all know how bad they are ... the iPhone is a good example). I clearly don't want to spend this amount of money to be a beta tester.

I'll certainly wait the 2nd or 3rd generation to grab it. The homemade processor will have enough time to be perfected, the battery will be stronger and the whole product will be much reliable.

About the conference itself, it has been disappointing: I was waiting for software upgrades (new iLife, new Aperture) and hardware (Macbook Pro, iPhone). It's hopefully going to be in March or June.

Anyway :)

Ajouter un commentaire

Nom :

Email :

Site web :

Commentaire :

Se souvenir de moi