So I caved. Two Fridays ago I stood in line outside the Apple Store on my lunch break, which is a stupid thing to admit but there it is, and walked out with a 32GB Verizon new iPad. Not "iPad 3." Apple's very insistent it's just "the new iPad," which is a naming decision I will be complaining about for years, I can already tell. Anyway, it's been about two weeks and I've got opinions.
First, the screen is genuinely the thing. 2048x1536, and I know pixel counts are the most boring possible way to describe anything, but reading actual text on this thing after a year and a half with the iPad 2 is like putting on glasses you didn't know you needed. Instapaper articles look like they were typeset. Photos I took on my regular camera look better on the iPad than they do on my laptop screen, which feels backwards but here we are.
The price didn't move, which surprised me a little. $499 for the base 16GB wifi model, same as always, LTE models start at $629. I paid more than that because I always end up talking myself into more storage than I need and then using about a third of it, a pattern I am fully aware of and do nothing to fix.
Now, the heat thing. You've probably seen this going around, Consumer Reports ran their tests last week and found the thing hits something like 116 degrees on the lower left corner when you're grinding through Infinity Blade for a while. I can confirm this is real and not tech-blog hysteria. Play anything graphically heavy for twenty minutes and the bottom left gets genuinely warm, not dangerous, not gonna-burn-you warm, but noticeably warmer than the iPad 2 ever got. My theory, which is just a guess, is that quad-core graphics chip and the LTE radio both dumping heat into a case that's only 0.7mm thicker than before was never going to end any other way. Doesn't bother me day to day. I don't grip the bottom-left corner while browsing Twitter. But it's a real thing and not made up.
LTE, though. Here's my actual complaint, the one nobody's really talking about yet. I'm on Verizon and the speeds are stupid fast, I got 24Mbps down sitting in a coffee shop yesterday which is faster than my home connection, no joke. But almost nothing on my home wifi network can keep up with what the iPad can now pull down, and half my apps still haven't been updated for the new resolution, so I've got this gorgeous retina screen showing me blurry app icons and pixelated menu bars in stuff I use constantly. Instagram, still blurry. A couple of my most-used news apps, still blurry. It's a weird in-between period and I imagine it'll sort itself out over the next month or two as developers catch up, but right now using this thing feels like living in two eras of hardware at once.
Small tangent because I can't help myself: Angry Birds Space came out last week too and apparently hit ten million downloads in under three days, which is an absurd number for a game about birds and pigs and now also space, for some reason. I bought it obviously. The zero-gravity slingshot mechanic is a nice enough twist but I don't think it's got the staying power of the original. We'll see.
One more thing worth mentioning since I've been half-following it: RIM posted a pretty brutal quarterly loss this week and is talking about "refocusing" on the enterprise market, which is the kind of phrase companies use when they mean "retreating." I had a BlackBerry as my very first smartphone back in like 2008 and it's strange watching a company go from that dominant to talking about refocusing in the span of a few years. Nothing in this industry stays still for long, which I guess is exactly why I started writing this blog in the first place.
Back to the iPad: worth the upgrade if you skipped the iPad 2, less clear cut if you're coming from a 2 like I was and just wanted the screen. I wanted the screen. No regrets, warm corner and all.