The new iPad: impressions

  • The screen is really, really sharp. Super beautiful. Reading on this is going to be great. The screen is the single most important thing on a tablet, and that’s exactly the one significant update that the new iPad got. It is awesome.
  • It gets warmer to the touch. This means it uses more power. It has a battery that is over 70% larger yet lasts as long as in the iPad 2 so it all evens out. It won’t burn you, don’t worry.
  • Apps that haven’t been updated to use the Retina display look terrible. This is a temporary problem, most apps will probably get updated soon. And every old iPad you see from now on will look blurry.
  • Applications take up more space on disk! This is because they need bigger graphics in order to look good in the Retina display.
  • The Planet Earth wallpaper that comes up by default in the Lock Screen does not appear to be Retina-sized. Maybe this is because I restored from my old iPad. In any case, here’s a high-resolution version I got through a super high-resolution photo from NASA. Feel free to use.

    Download this in your iPad and use it as a wallpaper.
  • iPhone apps run on the new iPad in Retina mode. This could presumably have been the case on the old iPads when the app is blown up to 2x, yet it wasn’t. Now playing Yaniv on the iPad will be more pleasant.
  • The new 5 MP camera is… I don’t know. I haven’t tried it. Who needs a camera on a tablet? The front camera is useful for FaceTime. The back one, not so much.
  • Restoring from an iCloud backup wasn’t as seamless as I would have hoped. I had to sign in to a bunch of things again (iMessage, FaceTime, email, etc). Then I had some issues when downloading all my apps again. I fixed it by signing in to the App Store somewhere. The error I was getting was no help whatsoever.
  • Things aren’t noticeably faster nor slower. About the same. Which is ok, because the iPad 2 performed just fine. More speed never hurts though.
  • Finally, here are two screenshots of The MXK®. The graphics aren’t high resolution but do look better on the new iPad because it’s scaling down the page to fit in the screen. And check out that text… so sharp. Picture every pixel of the image inside a 9.7 inch screen . I resized the iPad 2 screenshot to match the new iPad screenshot.


2 thoughts on “The new iPad: impressions”

  1. When you have an active toddler and grandparents far away, the back camera is very important… just saying.

  2. It’s important that there is a camera at all, good enough for videoconference. I’m not convinced that a high quality 5 MP camera that can record 1080p video is all that important.

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