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Quick and Informative Review on Apple’s iPad

Recently there’s been a lot of buzz surrounding Apple’s long-awaited and upcoming “phenomenon”, the iPad. If you’re wondering what the iPad is, it’s a tablet with a touch screen that operates on Apples entirely new (not OS X, but similar to the iPhone) platform. Let’s go a bit further and imagine an iPod touch that has a 10-inch screen, and with the capability of fast Internet surfing speeds, giant app icons, and versatility. That’s pretty much the iPad in a nutshell.

Within this article, we’ll touch base on a variety of features that may make or break the iPad. We’ll layout the facts and leave the rest to you. Let us know what you think!

Physical Characteristics

The iPad comes with a crystal clear 9.5 inch screen with a 1024-by-768-pixel resolution that was designed for browsing and reading eBooks. It also weighs 1.5 ounces, is .05 inch thick, and comes with a built-in 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB flash drive. This is where the price splits, since the basic 16GB iPad starts at $499. Even though it resembles that of the iPhone, we can assure you that the iPad is much more. Here’s why. The larger screen size will allow you to view applications with a lot more freedom, and you’re able to websites as you would on a laptop with minimal restrictions. The onscreen keyboard is extremely easy to type on, and resembles that of a laptop in terms of size. Whereas the iPhone’s keypad is sometimes difficult to work around.

A further look at a few more hardware features bring us to the iPads accelerometer, digital compass, built-in speakers, ambient light sensor, and microphone. The battery lasts an average of 10 hours, and Apple claims that those 10 hours are attributed to you watching movies, listening to music, and surfing the web. Not just if the iPad’s idling.

Operating System and Softwares

A large part of the controversy surrounding the iPad has to do with the fact that it’s not running OS X or anything similar to that. It seems to be operating out of an iPhone-like OS except it’s more advanced. The applications are streamlined from the Apple App Store right to the iPad and it’s capable of running almost every applications that already works on the iPhone as well. However, the apps will be resized to fit the full screen resolution or scaled down to resemble the iPhone’s screen.

Apple made an innovative move when they decided to include iBooks as a part of the iPad, and with over 140,000 touch-optimized apps and counting, you can’t go wrong here. This will mark a new age for developers as I’m sure many have already started designing iPad specific applications, or optimizing their iPhone apps to work simultaneously with the iPad on various levels such as a recognition feature for the app that will automatically resize the application’s resolution output to fit the entire iPad screen.

Connectivity

With the iPad you’re able to sync it with iTunes and when it comes to wireless connectivity, there are two different versions that are available. One relies upon WiFi-entirely, and the other can is free to roam the web with 3G connectivity. The difference is mostly in price, you don’t need a contract, and it will be shipped unlocked so that you’re able to use it with other carriers (besides AT&T). Unlimited data plans for AT&T start at $29.99/month.

The iPad also comes with Bluetooth, which will allow you connect to wireless headphones, or a wireless Apple keyboard among other accessories. If you don’t have a wireless headphone, no worries, as the iPad will be shipped with a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a VGA adapter will allow you to connect it to an external display if the 10-inch screen doesn’t suffice.

Other Features & Accessories

For the most part, the iPad does what we’d expect it to have done and more. Vibrant features such as increasingly fast mobile browsing with Safari, gorgeous multi-column email in Mail, Maps, iTunes music and video, Photos, a stunning interface to YouTube, Maps, Notes, a completely redesigned Calendar, amazing multi-touch, and the infamous Spotlight to search across the whole device makes the iPad a stand-alone device with hardly any contenders in its way.

Have a look at this amazing video that’s sure to be very informative on how how the iPad works and further features. There are are a large number of accessories available to future iPad owners. If the built-in touch keyboard isn’t enough, then you can take the keyboard dock for a spin. Also, you can purchase a rich-leather case to protect your device from hard falls or unexpected coffee spills. There are more accessories (some good, some bad) that are to come, you’d just have to keep your ears open.

Cons

Now that we’ve covered the good, we’ll make a quick note of features that should’ve been integrated into the iPad. Who knows, maybe Apple’s just holding off till the next version for next year. They’ve been known to do this in order to create a sort of viral hype before releasing the product, take the iPhone and iPhone 2 for example.

• No Support for Multitasking
• No Camera or Video Chat
• No USB Drive
• 3G Option Only Supports MicroSim