Now we’ve been able to recover from furious reporting and photo uploads from the live event, and some follow up thoughts. We’ve pulled together all the different articles and linked to them here.
First off, our live-blog from the event, which brought a wave of new readers to Recombu. Hope you enjoyed our coverage. The iPad 2; it was more impressive than we thought, but was made harder to report on by a no-cameras rule that got thrown aside not long into the event.
Through a live feed from San Francisco, Jobs bad-mouthed the competition and told us all how good Apple’s iPads have done. Not much newsworthy there- but then it appeared; a new tablet. A thinner, lighter, more powerful iPad. (And people across the pond applauded!)
We were also amongst the first to try the iPad 2 in the flesh, and the new A5 processor really flies; Our man in the thick of it was impressed by quick loading apps, and new uses of accelerometers in teh iPad; tapping the piano keys on the piano app lightly produces a softer note to hammering the keys with your fist. Not that we’d advise doing the latter, naturally.
We were also impressed with Apple’s new smart covers, the most appealing Apple-produced case since those little Nano socks.
Connecting to magnets embedded into the iPad (isn’t that dangerous?) the cover satisfyingly clicks on and off the iPad, and will even put it into sleep mode when the screen is covered, and ‘wake’ it up once removed. Sexy Apple design in action.
After some time to think about it, we think there’s currently no other tablet on the market right now that pitches the iPad 2’s great combination of apps and hardware.
One question that you need to ask yourself is whether we should buy the new iPad when it arrives on March 24. Granted, there are plenty of improvements, but is there enough to upgrade from the original?
We say it depends. If you’re going to be using processor intensive games, video editing apps and such, it may be worth waiting for the iPad 2. Otherwise, the original iPads, new, are going cheap, and second-hand prices have bottomed out. There has never been a better time to buy one.
Oh, did we forget to mention, the new one does come in white…
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