New iPad 3rd generation review
I have been using the iPad 3 for last 10 days. Received almost 3 weeks after I ordered it from Homeshop18. I also bought a Belkin sleeve and the Apple smart cover.
Here’s the review.
The good
Looks
The iPad is drop dead gorgeous. Beauty and quality are the two words that will inevitability come with anything Apple. Even the box, the plastic that wraps the products, everything is of such high quality and made with such a precision, you don’t even feel like throwing away the box. The white iPad I have got looks awesome and the pink smart cover goes well with it.
Retina Display
The display is best although you can’t really tell the difference if you don’t have anything else to compare against. The large screen really makes a laptop redundant. Browsing the web, reading ebooks and watching videos are so much better on the large 9.5 inch screen.
Battery life
This is the best battery life I have seen on any mobile device and especially of this size. I have to charge it every couple of days, the battery lasts forever if you don’t use it much. I use it for a few hours at night and at auto brightness with browsing and watching videos and playing Angry Birds it holds up really well.
Ease of use
iPad or rather iOS is for everyone. It just works. It doesn’t give you many options. It’s a good thing as well as a bad thing. The good thing is that there’s no learning curve. Using the default Apple apps is a pleasure. They are smooth, you touch and something happens. There are eye pleasing animations everywhere. You select multiple emails and they will all stack up and when you move them to a folder they will all go in a spiral and vanish in that folder. When you read a book ok iBooks, and turn the page, the animation is near perfect imitation of real life page flip. iOS makes things as real as it can get on a screen. I have not seen a lag yet on iPad which is now a common occurrence on my Nexus S. The apps don’t do much, but whatever they do, they do best.
The bad
It’s heavy
All that aluminum, large screen and heavy duty battery make this a heavyweight device. You can’t operate it with one hand. Of course a 10″ tablet isn’t meant to be operated by one hand but still…. For prolonged use you need a surface, lap or a tummy to rest it on 
Closed
It’s a closed system. A very very closed system. So closed that the files are specific to applications! You can not access files across different applications the way you do on a computer or on an Android device. Also it appears iOS doesn’t really allow third party apps to add features to underlying OS. For example in Android there’s a system wide share option and third party apps can add their name to that list. I can share anything from any app on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress, Google+, Email, GMail, Skype, Google Drive, Dropbox and many more apps. On iPad there are only four options – email, message, tweet and print. Not to mention that you can not install apps that are not approved by Apple unless you jail break the device. The only reason why a device with such a closed OS can be termed as a smart device is the ease of use of the App store. Finding and installing apps is just a matter of few taps.
iTunes
iTunes sucks!! If you are not in the US there’s not much you can do with the iTunes. You can’t buy most of the things and if you are not buying stuff on iTunes it’s useless. It’s pathetic when it comes to syncing with the device over USB. Ebooks and videos need to be converted to a format the dumb iTunes can understand and then only they get copied to the iPad.
Verdict
Despite it’s flaws overall iPad is a kick ass tablet. As a power user I would have liked some control over the OS but at the end of the day it just works. And that’s what matters the most. The other day my dad was trying to set Yaashi‘s photo that I had emailed him as a wallpaper on his computer and he was trying to find where the photo was. I asked him where did you save the photo and he said it was in Irfanview. Now Irfanview is just an image viewer, the photo is somewhere on the disk not in Irfanview, but I guess most of the normal users don’t really care where the photos is, they just want to view it and use it so Apple does have a point in making file storage specific to an app. All photos are in single app. You don’t have to bother with which folder they are in, they are in the photos app. All in one place.
Finally a comparison of iOS with Android. They are both completely different. Both are easy to use but Android is much more open than iOS. A third party developer can replace almost any portion of the OS whiles iOS is a walled garden. But when it comes to user experience iOS wins hand down mostly because it damn works and works pretty well for everyone.
History channel was recently relaunched and rebranded as History TV 18 and had some kick ass shows like Ice Road Truckers and was an absolute must! Even my cable guy provided it! Now this was too much. Videocon didn’t have a great website, DVR was not available online, customer support didn’t really look that good and the DVR had only 160 GB storage. Videocon was cancelled and I went back to drawing board. Now the choice was between Airtel and TataSky. I had called TataSky and confirmed, they too had switched to MPEG-4. Airtel had better HD package but was expensive, TataSky had a larger capacity disk and on the online forums I read they had been adding new HD channels regularly over last couple of months. Two months back they didn’t even have these many HD channels. They are slow in adding channels but they do add. And with the Mega Lite pack that I was considering I would get them all at no extra cost. TataSky also has a service called Video On Demand where I can connect the box to Internet and I can download videos, even movies and shows from the past 5 days and I would have ample space to store all the content. At this point I think its a unique feature provided only by TataSky.
So TataSky it was. TataSky+ HD to be specific. I paid Rs. 10,200 for which I got HD DVR with 500 GB hard disk, full year subscription for the Mega Lite pack which included all channels carried by TataSky including HD, 12 showcase movies and 1 year subscription to BusinessWorld magazine. And under a special offer I got 500 Rs. credit in my account. Paid it yesterday, and it was installed at my home today morning.
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