Blog Stuart's Blog

Stuart

IPAD 2 Review

  • 10 May 2011I decided after a much deliberation (5minutes) after a phone call from Vodafone offering an IPAD 2 on a special rate because I am a long standing customer to go ahead and order one.  The rest of the world seems to be IPAD crazy so I thought there cant be smoke without fire and there must be something in it.

    After getting an email from Vodafone on Thursday to say that my order is being processed but the IPAD 2 is out of stock, and as a rule to give between 2 – 4 weeks for delivery I was a bit surprised to get another email from Vodafone the following day to let me know that my IPAD had been dispatched and would be delivered the next working day.

    It arrived as promised next working day which was yesterday.  I was a bit unsure what to expect as I have always been a MS Windows user, even down to my phones, I am a BlackBerry user and have never really been interested in an iPhone.  I’ve never been a major fan of the itunes software, I feel that in my experience has proved to be quite cumbersome and unnecessarily duplicates files as well as the numerous stories from friends of them plugging iPods into other PC’s and having their music library wiped.

    Anyway, got home, unpacked the iPad, inserted the micro sim card from Vodafone (after spending 5 minutes looking for the paperclip style tool that comes with the IPAD 2 to release the micro sim holder) and switched it on.  I was hit with the image of a USB cable being inserted into an itunes logo, I tried pressing the home button on the IPAD thinking that it would take me to the desktop and I could set up itunes later, this wasn’t the case.  So I plugged the IPAD into my laptop and started up itunes, after a few minutes I could see that the laptop had successfully installed the driver for the IPAD but still nothing appeared on itunes….. I was confused :(

    Although I was on version 10 of itunes I apparently needed the latest release, which I downloaded and installed, restarted laptop and there it was, the IPAD was now connected to itunes.

    Hassle aside, it was finally time to get a play around on the IPAD and download some apps, connect it to wifi etc
    Connecting to my home wifi was really simple, when I searched for my network it found it really quickly and when I entered the pre shared key it joined my network without any hassle.  Occasionally I do get hassle from my Windows based laptop when joining the network.

    I downloaded a few apps to start to get the hang of it, some of the apps included a newspaper app, Sky News, BBC News, a Radio app and some games.

    First off the start up time from off is amazing! The app load up time is quite something.  For example I could click on the Sky News app and within 2 seconds I could have a live video stream, the radio app picked up my location with about 5 seconds and then allowed me to play any radio station in the area with what seemed like no buffer time.
    Using the browser Safari for the first time I was a bit apprehensive to how some websites were going to appear and interact, but after browsing a few including ww.google.com, www.bbc.co.uk as well as some of our own websites like www.lanarkshirejobs.com , www.albamilfit.co.uk  and www.perfectbalancestudio.co.uk I was so impressed with the load time and functionality of all the site, as sometimes when we are developing new websites we sometimes get issues relating to Internet Explorer and how the site appears in that browser we sometimes forget about other browsers such as Safari and Google Chrome.

    All in all, day 2 and I am impressed with the IPAD 2 in general, time will only tell with the novelty test