Apple announced the latest iPad yesterday, and they have made a bunch of improvements to the device.
The chief update is the new screen, which is what Apple call a Retina Display, with a Resolution double that of the iPad 2, and promises to play video at full HD quality.
The next update is really the camera which is now the camera Apple provides in the iPhone 4. At 5 MegaPixels it is still not that great but the current iPad camera is terrible, so hat is a welcome upgrade.
Other than that there isn’t much to report. The ability to record video in HD is good, but the prices and storage capacities are still the same. For those who like to connect to the internet while away from wifi the new iPad will now be able to connect using what is called 4G, although whether any of the ISP’s are actually providing that level of service at the moment we don’t know.
If you haven’t yet purchased an iPad then these updates may well give you more of a reason to get hold of one, but for current iPad users, there is little to persuade you to upgrade. The largest criticism we have is that the storage capacities haven’t increased, which is a real limiting factor in the iPad.
The basic iPad is £399 with 16GB of storage, which is not much more than 12GB in actual capacity. By the time you save a few HD movies to the device, take some nice high res camera pics, and record some HD video, we expect that the storage will be just about used up, and that is without the apps, which of course, will be larger in size if they are using the higher resolutions. Maybe Apple think everything will be streamed to your iPad through the iCloud, but that isn’t always practical, or even logical.
Despite the screen, which undoubtedly will be amazing, this is a bit of a backward step in our opinion. We wouldn’t recommend the lower capacity iPad models at the moment, and when you start going up in capacity, the price of the iPad is then in real laptop territory, and it is no longer such an easy purchase decision.