So I've had the new iPad for about a week and a half now (yes, the one Apple just calls "the new iPad," no number, which is going to be a nightmare for anyone searching their own archives in five years) and I think I finally have opinions worth typing out instead of just muttering to myself.
Quick recap for anyone who's been off the grid: Apple announced this thing on March 7th, it went on sale March 16th, and apparently they sold three million of them over that opening weekend. Three million. In three days. I ordered mine online at like 3am the night preorders opened because I am apparently that person now, and it showed up on launch day in a box that felt suspiciously identical to my iPad 2's box.
It is not identical. The screen is the whole story here and honestly the screen earns the hype. 2048x1536, they're calling it Retina, and the first time I opened a photo I'd taken with my actual camera I just sat there for a second. Text renders like it's printed. I went back and looked at my iPad 2 sitting next to it and it suddenly looked soft and a little blurry in a way I never noticed before I had something to compare it to, which is sort of an annoying trick to play on someone who just bought last year's model.
Here's my actual complaint though, and it's not really about the screen at all: this thing runs warm. Not scary warm, not gonna-burn-your-lap warm, but noticeably warmer than the 2 ever got, especially if you're charging it while doing anything graphically heavy. I was playing Infinity Blade II on the couch Tuesday night with it plugged in and the back edge near the camera got genuinely toasty. Nobody at the Apple Store mentioned that part. It's also heavier than the 2, only by a few ounces on paper, but you feel it after forty minutes of holding it up in bed reading, and my wrist definitely noticed before my brain did the math on why.
The camera bump is real too, by the way, and I still think it's a little absurd that we're all supposed to pretend holding up an 11-inch slab to take a photo in public is a normal thing adults do. I did it once outside a coffee shop to test the new iSight camera and felt like I was filming a hostage video. The photos were fine! Better than the 2's camera by a wide margin, actual 1080p video, colors look right instead of that washed-out thing older iPad photos always had. I just refuse to be the guy doing it at a concert.
On the software side, nothing's really changed, which I guess is the point. iOS 5.1 runs the same as it did on the 2, just with more room to draw. Apps that haven't been updated for the new resolution look kind of fuzzy now by comparison, which is a weird new problem to have — before, everything looked the same amount of okay, now some things look amazing and other things look like they got left behind. I noticed it first in a note-taking app I use constantly and it bugged me more than it probably should have.
Worth mentioning too, since it happened right around the same time and I think it's connected in spirit even if Apple and Google would hate me saying so: Google finally killed off the Android Market name a couple weeks back and folded it into Google Play along with the music and books stuff. One url, one brand, one place to buy things. It's a smaller move than a new tablet obviously but it's the same instinct, everybody's trying to make the "buy digital stuff on your device" experience less fragmented, and it's been a long time coming on Google's side honestly.
Anyway. If you've got an iPad 2 and you're on the fence, I don't think the case for upgrading is as obvious as Apple wants it to be, the 2 still does basically everything fine. If you're coming from an original iPad or nothing at all, this is a genuinely great object to own and the screen alone might be worth it. I don't regret the 3am preorder, even if my thumb is a little tired of texting people screenshots of how sharp everything looks.
Going to go let it cool off on the nightstand now.