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iPad has truly evolved into alternative to laptop
By now, many people will have made up their minds about the new iPad.
Either the promise of a high-end display and access to next-generation wireless networks have persuaded them to fork over their money, or they haven't.
For owners of the original iPad, upgrading tends to be easier to justify. Owners of the iPad 2 have a harder time making the case to themselves, but even those who say "no" are doing their best to avoid catching sight of its younger sibling. (A smaller but growing number are tapping contentedly away on their Android tablets, and I look forward to meeting one of them someday.)
For me, buying a third-generation iPad answered a question I wondering for a while: Do I need a laptop? The answer, I've decided after a week with the new tablet, is no.
Two years ago, when I bought the original iPad, I expected to use it for reading, watching videos with Tipard iPad Video Converter and checking e-mail - and that's mostly what I did. But last year, which I spent using an iPad 2, the tablet became the center of my computing life. Highly portable, and supported by a long-lasting battery, it was a powerful lightweight device that could come with me anywhere I wanted to go.
Occasionally I found myself missing a physical keyboard - it's the reason I rarely did work on my tablet. But this year, heeding the suggestion of Time technology editor Harry McCracken, I acquired a Bluetooth keyboard case. Slide an iPad into your case - I use the one Harry does, the $100 ZaggFolio - and you've suddenly got a laptop with better battery life than almost any on the market today.
The keyboard case has changed the way I think about iPads - and made it much more useful for work. It turns out that many people, even writers, go for long stretches without needing to type anything longer than a tweet. But now, whenever I need to take notes or write at any length, I have a detachable keyboard built for that purpose. (The ZaggFolio has great battery life itself; I've gone a month between charges.)
The new iPad arrives this month with a pair of distinct advantages over laptops on the market today. One is that display - four times the pixels of iPad 2, which you'll marvel at every time you're using an app that takes advantage of them. The display actually evolved faster than the Internet did - as the New York Times reported this week, some images on the Web look less sharp on the iPad because they haven't been scaled up to match its resolution.
Its other main advantage? Access to those fast cellular networks. Laptop warriors are forever searching for hotspots to grant them Internet access. If you're willing to pay a premium for the 4G model - and for those data plans, which start at $20 a month - the iPad is its own hotspot. On Verizon's network, you can even share your connection with up to five devices. (I tried that for a couple of hours this week, and suddenly about 400 megabytes of my 1 gigabyte plan had disappeared. Sad, bitter lesson learned.)
These advances comes with trade-offs; the new iPad is 0.6 millimeters thicker and about a tenth of a pound heavier, depending on the model. Contrary to published reports, the iPad is not particularly hot to the touch, even after running an epic game of "Draw Something." It warms up like most other electronic devices during times of heavy use - but then, Apple can do only so much about the laws of thermodynamics.
Against that backdrop, the iPad is looking more and more like a device built for work as well as play. With the latest version of its tablet, Apple has cemented its place as the leader in a market it all but created. And along the way it's making even laptops look a little less necessary than they used to be.
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