iPad popularity sends laptop component makers to cloud

The world's two biggest laptop assemblers are seeking shelter in the cloud as Apple Inc's iPad threatens the future of personal computers. 

Quanta Computer Inc and Compal Electronics Inc, the Taiwanese companies that together make half of all portable computers, are turning to servers and the tablets that access them. 

Revenue from building notebooks for clients such as Hewlett-Packard Co and Dell Inc at Taoyuan, Taiwan-based Quanta fell last year for the first time since the company listed in 1999 as the US PC market declined for the first time in a decade. 

Sales of the iPad, cheaper and lighter than most laptops, have forced a slowdown in the $233 billion PC market, pushing the assemblers to chase orders from Google Inc and Amazon.com Inc for servers and tablets. 

The Taiwanese companies are taking a cue from their customers. Dell is cutting its reliance on PCs and HP considered spinning off the business, seven years after International Business Machines Corp ( IBM) exited the market. 

"The golden era for notebooks is over," said Arthur Liao, an analyst at Fubon Financial Holding Co in Taipei, who rates Quanta an add and has no rating on Compal. "Quanta and Compal need to diversify into cloud computing devices like tablets and servers if they want to survive and grow." 

The success of iPads and other tablets has accelerated the growth of the cloud. Unlike PCs, tablets don't store reams of data, but rather rely on frequent access to remote servers to run their applications, stream videos and music, and tap into all manner of other data. 

Cloud computing 

Sales at Quanta, the world's biggest laptop assembler, from cloud-computing products will climb 80 per cent this year as Google and Amazon boost orders, said Kirk Yang, an analyst with Barclays Plc. Compal last year more than doubled the proportion of its revenue from devices other than notebooks, said Jimmy Chen, an analyst with Masterlink Securities Corp in Taipei. 

Sales of cloud-computing products, including servers, tablets such as Amazon's Kindle Fire and Internet routers, at Quanta will account for 13.4 per cent of revenue this year from 8.7 per cent last year, Yang said. Analysts estimate revenue growth will be 9 per cent this year after dropping 1.3 per cent last year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Quanta Chief Financial Officer and spokesman Elton Yang declined an interview request. 

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"Quanta and Compal recognized a while ago that notebook growth is slowing and they needed to look for new products," said Chen, who rates both companies hold and estimates that combined they made about half the world's laptops in the past decade. "Moving into cloud devices is new and risky territory for them, but it's a move they need to make." 

Quanta's shares have climbed 20 per cent this year in Taipei and Compal's have added 8.6 per cent, compared with a 7.8 per cent advance in the benchmark Taiex index. 

With social networking sites such as Facebook Inc, Google and Twitter Inc gaining in popularity and more people using the Internet to buy and store music and data, demand for servers continues to climb. 

That same can't be said for PCs. Global computer shipments climbed 0.5 per cent last year to 353 million units, trailing the 7 per cent rise in sales volume for servers, according to researcher Gartner Inc. Significantly, server revenue gained even higher, at 7.9 per cent, Gartner said, indicating average prices increased during the year. 

New iPad and iPad 2: The Quadruple Pixel Difference

The new iPad has four times as many pixels as the iPad 2. To really show how this matters, we had to get really, really close to both, but the results are impressive. 

The Retina display on the new iPad is one of its biggest advances over the iPad 2, but to really make this clear you have to get very close to the tablet.

With a resolution of 2,048 by 1,536 pixels, the new iPad has four times the pixels of the iPad 2 and packs more resolution into 10 inches than any HDTV on the market several times its size. It stands between 1080p resolution, which modern HDTVs use, and 4K resolution, which high-end cinema projectors use (and which won't find any significant use in homes for several years).

The new iPad's screen is genuinely impressive. For perspective, and to better explain the resolution issue, every pixel in the iPad 2 is occupied by four pixels on the new iPad. We used a macro lens and got up close to the two tablets to compare the screens. If you can't already tell, the new iPad is shown on the left and the iPad 2 is shown on the right.

A close-up of the Safari icon shows just how much more resolution is packed into the screen. At this magnification, the individual pixels are bright and clear on the iPad 2, but are still too small to be individually identified on the iPad. The icons you see every day on the iPad look so sharp you can't see the pixels without looking very, very close. It's a marked difference over the iPad 2, which was rightfully praised for having a bright, crisp screen. The new iPad just looks that much better at that distance.

Text is less notable, but is still smoother. If you use your iPad as an ebook reader or Web browser, you're going to be staring at a lot of text. With the iPad 18 inches away from your face, the new iPad and iPad 2 look clear and readable. At just an inch away, the letters are as different as calligraphy and Lego blocks. This close, the angle of the 'x' looks slightly fuzzy at most on the new iPad, but shows clear pixel stairs on the iPad 2. For reference, the red line is one inch.

There's also the issue of zooming out. It's not as important as zooming in to see things more clearly, but it is the best example of the new iPad beating the iPad 2 in resolution. The Ziff Davis logo in the corner of the page has been zoomed out until it's a fraction of an inch. The new iPad shows the logo as the Ziff Davis logo. The iPad 2 shows the logo and the text around it as a cluster of pixels too large to display the information.

You don't get up close to see the individual pixels of your monitor, but they do matter. A long time ago, 320 by 240 was a high resolution. Then VGA (640 by 480). Then SVGA (800 by 600). Now monitors exceed resolutions of 1,600 by 900. We might not notice the changes at first, but when the upgrade is made it becomes clear. The jump from the iPad 2 to the new iPad is the same jump we took from standard definition TV to high-definition television. TV was great years ago, but HDTV has improved the experience so much that the old screens just look fuzzy. The iPad 2 is still a great tablet on its own, but when you compare it to the new iPad it just looks fuzzy.

The New iPad3 is here: Review

 

The new iPad 3 is here: with Apple promising this to be another revolutionary device, we're wondering if the brand can really keep exciting users with its new devices. Can a sharper screen and improved innards entice enough people to make the jump?

Confusingly, Apple's latest model has no number in its name this time around strictly speaking (although most are still referring to it as the iPad 3 to avoid an Inception-like meltdown) – a sure sign that it's here to stay, like the iPod and MacBook Pro.

The main upgrades over the iPad 2 come in the form of a much higher resolution screen (Apple's calling it a Retina Display, although it lacks the pixel density of the iPhone 4S) and the slight spec boost to an A5X CPU.

 

We've also got a new level of connectivity to bring faster on-the-go speeds than ever before, plus an improved camera that's been increased to 5MP.

Is it enough to warrant an upgrade? Will it bring the same wow-factor Apple is so well-known for? TechRadar's had a good ol' play with the new iPad 3, so let's dive in and find out:

Design

You know the iPad 2? That's what this looks like. We mean, it's identical but for an extra 0.6mm thickness (up to 9.4mm) and around 50g of weight (650g for Wi-Fi only, 662g for the 4G model). Last year's cases will mostly still fit, though those with magnets to lock the screen may not work.

 

If you don't know what the iPad 2 looks like (and, really, where have you been?) it's a 9.7in glass screen with chic aluminium back. It's well-built with an exceptionally classy feel to it.

• New iPad vs iPad 2: which should you choose?

The new iPad 3's extra heft and thickness might put some people off – but it's only in side by side comparisons that the difference is noticeable. If you walked into an Apple store and picked it up, you wouldn't think it was a heavy tablet at all – although it is nearly 100g heavier than the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1.

 

As before, the new iPad 3 has a home button on the front so you can easily wake the screen. There's the rocker switch on the right edge to either mute the sound or lock the orientation – you choose, which is something users haven't been offered much from Apple in the past.

 

The Apple 30-pin connector remains the only physical socket on the iPad, besides the 3.5mm headphone jack. This means you need adaptors to connect a USB stick or camera's SD memory card, but then again we never really expected the Cupertino lot to make a huge jump to new connectivity options here.

 

Adaptors will work fine to move images or documents onto the iPad, but getting them off is a whole other matter if you don't have Wi-Fi. It's not impossible but is annoyingly difficult, and remains a bugbear for many iPad users – especially when Android offerings are so much more adept at such things.

New iPad 3: Retina Display

 

With the new iPad 3, Apple has decided the time is ripe for a brighter, sharper screen with a much higher resolution, and the impact is clear to see.

That higher resolution is 2,048 x 1,536 – lower PPI than the Retina screen on an iPhone 4S (264 compared to the 330 on offer with the smartphone), but designed to be held at 15 inches from your eyes (rather than 10), so Apple has plumped to keep the Retina name because you cannot, in its words, see the pixels at that distance.

 

A tablet like the iPad is mostly made up of the screen and this time around, what a screen it is. It's stunning, though the real surprise is how subtle it is.

The actual real-life impact of the improved display is the standout feature of the new iPad 3; it's crisper, sharper and a genuine and immediate pleasure to use because of this.

 

Last year's iPad 2 had a great display, but when you peer closely at letters or curved lines you can just pick out jagged edges. There are none of those on iPad 2012. Sometimes people ask about a new Apple product: is it really that much better? This time, it really is.

Just browsing through photos in the new iPhoto app is enough to leave the most hardened of screen nuts smiling.

It's genuinely beautiful – and a huge step on from not only its now cut-price predecessor, but also many of its Android rivals.

The impact of a new screen even on everyday tasks like browsing is impressive. The resolution shift makes websites sharper and easier to read, and lessens the need to zoom in on text.

 

Even with the full TechRadar site on screen the words are clear, making the whole experience nicer.

Of course, right now, not every app has been Retina-upgraded. Those that have look spectacular, though the rest still look more than fine thanks to upscaling, whether you're playing Infinity Blade or Angry Birds.

Not only has the resolution been increased, the colour saturation is boosted here, too. Not to the brash gaudiness that can bedevil AMOLED screens, but noticeably brighter than before.

 

There will be that darned crossover period as applications get re-tooled to take advantage of the higher resolution (such as Sky Sports' new application, which was confirmed to TechRadar as being developed to take advantage of the new Retina Display) but in two or three months' time, we'll be seeing some truly glorious applications that really look stunning at the larger screen size.

New iPad 3: Interface, media and gaming

 

Those of you that are playing around with an iPad 2 won't notice very much of an update with iOS 5.1 under the hood – it's not much of an update from iOS 5.

The A5 CPU at the heart of the iPad 2 is in some ways unchanged this time around. It's only the graphical part which has been upgraded, to quad-core, Apple says. This gives it the new moniker of A5X.

Well, although a faster CPU would have been nice, it's not that the iPad 2 was a slowcoach. With so many more pixels to deal with, the focus had to be on the graphics processor, and it's a great success.

In our highly scientific under-the-finger tests, the new iPad 3 performed admirably. We couldn't fault it for response time or ability to register an input, and no matter how many applications we fired up and shut down, there was nary a hint of slowdown – although on occasion the app itself takes its time to be ready to use.

 

Apple doesn't state how much RAM its iPads have, but the rumour is that the new iPad 3 has been doubled from 512MB to 1GB, which would also explain its nimbleness.

One point to note: the new iPad 3 decided to get pretty hot on more than one occasion; not so scalding that it couldn't be held, but enough to provide a touch of consternation when there was no obvious reason for the device to be working so hard.

The real test will come with those new Retina-friendly apps we're looking forward to come streaming through the App Store, though movies are spectacular on the new iPad 3: a 1080p movie downloaded from iTunes gleamed and played with buttery smoothness.

 

The Retina Display and the quad-core graphical processor combined offer up a real chance for Apple to come out with a heavyweight in the portable gaming market, and we think it's gone a long way to being a real contender.

We spent a little time with the dreadfully named, but beautifully visual, Sky Gamblers Air Supremacy. You can swoop through the air in stunning visuals and the processor is powerful enough to manage it with not even a hint of stutter.

Apple suggested in the launch that people said they preferred gaming in an iPad. While we don't agree with this, the enhanced resolution means that this won't disappoint those used to the visuals on a PS3 or Xbox 360.

 

It's games like that this that best show the progression of the new iPad 3 over the iPad 2 – the changes may have been predicted, but the overall impact on the device is genuinely impressive when you actually get the new tablet in your hands.

New iPad 3: Camera and Apps

 

The camera is a big upgrade – from a less-than-1MP sensor in the iPad 2 before to 5MP sensor now. There's still no flash, but then this is hardly the shape, weight or size to make it a natural replacement for your DSLR.

And anyway, this camera just sucks in the light thanks to a wide-open aperture (f/2.4), a backside-illuminated sensor and a lens structure borrowed from the iPhone 4S.

 

CAMERA FOOL: Look at the camera app, now back to me, then back at the camera app, then back to ME

Video recording was the priority last year, and this is now upgraded to 1080p capture.

Quality is very strong and the built-in image stabilisation is deeply impressive – our best bouncy walk should have made for unwatchable footage but the new iPad shrugged it off.

Stills are decent, with great detail – and we were massively impressed with the speed with which the new iPad 3 was able to move from snap to snap, although it's nowhere near the speed of the iPhone 4S when it comes to photography on the go.

 

The lack of manual options to change elements like resolution will frustrate many though, despite the new iPad 3 not really being a device for photography. The camera decides how much detail you need and you can't affect this. Still, you get the option to downsize when you email images.

 

PHOTO BOOTH: Look at this face. And all the ways you can play with the photo...

The front facing camera is a decent option for stills – we think that it should, in some ways, be as powerful as the primary camera as so many portrait shots will be taken on the new iPad 3 that the same clarity would be beneficial.

Is the new iPad 3 camera a real selling point for the tablet? In our opinion, no; and neither should it be when it comes to this kind of device. Apple has made the iPad camera as good as it needs to be, so should you need to take video or a photo on the go with your tablet, the results will rarely disappoint.

Apps and storage

The onboard applications are still fairly sparse with the new iPad 3, which is understandable when there are over 200,000 available to download on the App Store.

There are some new options on offer here: for instance, Dictation for helping transcription when you're at a busy conference or can't be bothered with all that tapping on the screen business to input messages.

 

It works very well in practice – the sad news that Siri is (inexplicably) not present on the new iPad 3 is somewhat offset here, as the accuracy is high enough for us to give it a big tick.

However, there's another, darker, side to apps on the new iPad 3 that we think will give you pause for thought; especially if you're considering only buying a 16GB new iPad 3 variant…

Downloads are going to be a big part of life with the iPad. There are already 1080p movies available on iTunes, with more titles being upgraded daily.

The who-was-Shakespeare movie, Anonymous turned out to be a 4.4GB download. Since the maximum capacity iPad is still 64GB, it'll be easy to fill up the iPad fast. The clamour for a 128GB iPad is likely to start now.

 

Big downloads can only occur over Wi-Fi and if you have a 2GB download cap from your broadband provider you're likely to bust it with one TV show.

And remember that although the box may say Wi-Fi + 4G, in the UK you're only going to have 3G speeds.

In the right place, you could find 21Mbps, or even more, which is great, but 4G LTE isn't here yet and when it arrives in the UK won't be compatible with this iPad.

Take heart from the fact that routinely fast 4G LTE signals are still far from the norm across the US.

New iPad 3: Verdict

 

It would have been nice to have more new features, a faster CPU and Siri (which is surprisingly absent, though the best bit of it, Dictation, is present and works extremely well for a number of tasks).

But more hardware upgrades in addition to the Retina Display would have made it impossible to keep the price the same as last year's. In fact, it's surprising Apple has managed to stabilise the price with such an expensive extra component as the new screen.

We liked

The new display is enough to take your breath away. The improved camera is a bonus, as are software programs like iPhoto – which makes use of the display and the camera effectively.

The connection speeds will prove useful as networks have more super-fast masts in place, though incompatible 4G will be disappointing in a year or two for all UK dwellers. Overall, though, this is far and away the best iPad Apple has made.

We disliked

The thickness increase, as well as the weight, is an odd choice for a company that prides itself on design in the way that Apple does.

The 64GB model is quickly becoming the must-have version of the new iPad 3, as the app sizes are going to start swallowing up swathes of storage thanks to that HD-level screen. And at that capacity, you're going to need to part with £659 if you want to play it safe.

And that's before the contract price too: you'll be forking out £25 a month for two years, plus an extra £350-odd upfront, to own the larger capacity new iPad 3.

The heat issue was also slightly disconcerting on occasion – we've seen it before but it can really affect battery life if left unchecked.

Final verdict

With a wealth of wonderful apps, a more powerful processor, far superior connectivity and a better camera, this is already a step up.

But it is that display that makes the new iPad stand out from the crowd. It's a beautiful, welcome addition that takes this device back to the top of the tablet tree, and it is likely to bring a massive slice of business to an Apple store near you.

It feels futile to berate any Apple product for having an eye-watering price – if users are going to buy something in record numbers, surely the cost is spot on.

We do feel there should be a touch more awesome for a 64GB device at that price tag, but in the burgeoning tablet market Apple is nowhere near as out of touch as it is in the smartphone arena.

In short: if you've got an iPad 2, or don't really care about visuals, then you should stick with / purchase the now much cheaper pad.

But we recommend you probably don't look at the upgraded model – once you've gazed adoringly into the Retina Display, played any of the high-power games or watched a Full HD movie in your hands, you'll struggle to not hate any tablet that isn't the new iPad 3.

The New iPad Makes Apple’s Tablet Domination Clearer Than Ever

Even if you have perfect vision, indulge me here for a second. You know when you go in for an eye exam and you’re asked to look at a combination of letters and numbers on a chart against a far wall? You read the first few lines, then realize you actually can’t go any further. Then you get prescribed glasses (or contacts) and you can all of a sudden read every letter and number. And even the ones you could read before are now so much clearer.

That’s what it’s like looking at the new iPad versus the older iPads.

It’s weird because I was never one of those people who thought the original iPad’s and the iPad 2′s screen was poor (but there were plenty of those people in the post-iPhone Retina world). I guess it’s just like a pre-glasses world — you never realize how blurry things are because that’s just how you’ve always seen everything. And then you put the glasses on and you wonder how you ever managed without them.

Once you see and use the new iPad, there will be no going back.

Perhaps it’s unfair to say the older iPad screens look “blurry” compared to the new iPad. It’s more along the lines of “fuzzy”. After using the new iPad for an extended period of time then switching back to an iPad 2 (or 1, for that matter), you’ll cringe at the pixelated cloud the appears to surround every app icon. Text will look murky. Colors will look muted.

The iPad 2 is still far and away the best tablet on the market today (the iPad 3 officially comes this Friday, of course), and the new iPad screen manages to make it look like antiquated technology. That’s not to say you shouldn’t get an iPad 2 at the new $399 price, it’s just that if you go that route, don’t bother looking at the new iPad first. It will ruin the iPad 2 for you. Again, this is the best tablet out there right now that we’re talking about.

Ever since Apple unveiled the “Retina” display on the iPhone 4 over a year and a half ago, there’s been speculation about a Retina iPad. To some, it seemed inevitable. To others, it seemed impossible.

There’d be no content. It would cost far too much to make. It would require too much power for a portable machine. Or it would be too thick to accommodate the required huge battery. These were arguments made just a year ago. But Apple has done it.

What we have is a 9.7-inch stab of aluminum and glass that when illuminated, becomes an absolutely stunning display of light and color. At first glance, the new iPad is almost indistinguishable from the iPad 2. The same Smart Covers even fit on both. But it doesn’t matter what the device looks like. What matters is what you’re looking at: the screen.

Web pages look almost as if they’re being displayed in a high-quality glossy magazine. Photos look like photos — the printed out kind. Text is razor sharp and crisp, just like print.

And while the screen is the single biggest selling point of the new iPad, there are a few other things I’ve been enjoying nearly as much in my week testing out the device.

The most notable of these is the LTE functionality. Put simply: it’s fast. Really fast. Faster-than-my-WiFi fast.

Yesterday, I clocked the new iPad using LTE at over 40 mbps down and 20 up on Verizon’s network. That’s about twice as fast as my current home cable broadband. For good measure, I tethered the new iPad to my iPhone 4S to compare it to Verizon’s 3G speeds. It’s about 40x faster for downloading.

(My LTE speed tests ranged from about 15 mbps down to 42 mbps down and 10 mbps up to 20 mbps up. Most of the time I was in the upper range in both categories.)

 

I never saw the point of getting the 3G version of the iPad because WiFi is available in many places, and where it’s not, you could just tether to your phone. But I will absolutely get an LTE iPad. Again, it’s faster than most WiFi networks I usually connect to.

And the Verizon version of the new iPad comes with LTE hotspot functionality right out of the box at no additional cost beyond the standard data plans. AT&T does not yet offer tethering from the new iPad, though apparently they’re talking about it.

Apple’s stated reasons for not including LTE technology earlier in their products include both design and battery considerations. They’ve clearly solved both issues with the new iPad. The battery life is said to be the same (10 hours on WiFi, 9 hours using a cellular connection) as the iPad 2. In using it, I’ve found this to be the case. LTE may drain the battery a bit quicker than 3G did, but it’s not noticeably worse. Battery life overall is still excellent.

As for LTE being a burden on the design of the product, Apple has been able to keep the shell of the new iPad almost exactly the same as the previous iteration. It’s ever-so-slightly thicker (0.37 inches versus 0.34 inches), which you can only really tell when you hold the two at the same time. The new iPad also weighs slightly more than the iPad 2 (1.46 pounds versus 1.36 pounds — for the cellular versions), but the weight difference is basically indistinguishable.

So how was Apple able to keep the battery life the same while adding LTE and without drastically changing the design? It appears that they’ve had a fairly major breakthrough in their battery technology. While the new battery clearly isn’t much bigger than the old one, it can hold much more juice (42 watt-hours versus 25-watt-hours). The downside of this is that I’ve found it takes quite a bit longer to charge the new iPad. As in several hours — you’ll probably want to do it overnight.

One other slight downside which I have to assume is related to either the battery or the LTE functionality is that unlike previous iPad models, the new iPad does get noticeably warm in the lower left corner after prolonged use. It’s never hot, just warm. But again, I never noticed this on other models.

 

Another big upgrade in this new iPad: the camera. Previously, the iPad camera was more or less a joke for still photography. Apple’s line on this is that it was really only meant to shoot 720p video, but plenty of people would use it to take pictures — and the resulting 0.7 megapixel images were well, not good (see below).

Seeing that use case, Apple included a much, much, much better 5 megapixel five-element lens. It has a ƒ/2.4 aperture and a hybrid infrared filter. I honestly don’t know what half of that stuff means, all I care about is the fact that the images from the new iPad look very good now. There is no flash on the new iPad, but the flash on the iPhone tends to be fairly poor anyway.

This new lens can also shoot 1080p video (again, up from 720p) at 30 frames-per-second. And it features video stabilization.

The front camera, meanwhile, remains the ho-hum VGA-quality variety. But Apple bills that as being primarily for FaceTime (and presumably, higher-quality images would lead to lag). One sad aside here: despite the fact that the LTE networks are so much faster (faster than my WiFi even), Apple says that FaceTime will still be WiFi-only for now.

In terms of speed, the new iPad feels very fast. But the iPad 2 felt very fast. There’s probably a good reason for this: reports have the A5 chip being similar to the new A5X chip. One key difference is in the graphics capabilities. It takes a lot of GPU horsepower to run the Retina display. The A5X’s quad-core graphics are the key there.

 

And the boosted graphics should also lead to some major advances in iPad gaming. Apple showed off a few demos during their keynote last week, but sadly, those games are not yet available.

The new iPad also reportedly comes with double the RAM (1GB versus 512MB), Apple never gives out that spec, but tear-downs don’t lie. Again, I haven’t noticed too big of a bump from this, but it’s the early days and apps aren’t yet optimized for the new device.

Speaking of apps, Apple has upgraded just about all of their own applications to be Retina-ready. The result are apps that look amazing while still being responsive. I tested out iPhoto, Pages, Keynote, Numbers, iMovie, GarageBand, and a few others.

iPhoto is the clear star, as it’s the brand-new app that Apple unveiled last week. Combined with the better camera, it works great for most photo-editing needs. There are slight bits of lag here and there when doing things like adjusting brightness by dragging your finger over a large image, but overall it’s very solid.

And if you want to take images with the still-better 8 megapixel camera on the iPhone 4S, you can easily move them over to edit on the iPad via the Beam functionality.

The only third-party app which I could find that was available as Retina-ready at the time of this review was Tweetbot, a Twitter client made by Tapbots. Pushed to the App Store yesterday, the difference side-by-side with the iPad 2 version is readily apparent.

 

Apple tells me that more Retina-ready apps should be ready to roll by the actual iPad launch on Friday. But unless your favorite apps are graphics-heavy, they shouldn’t look too bad since iOS will automatically upscale the text in each app on the new iPad. Even scaled-up iPhone apps look significantly better on this new screen.

The one downside of the new Retina-ready apps is that they’re going to take up more space. Apple has raised the cap on download limits over wireless, but for many apps, you’ll need WiFi to download them. And you should think about this storage requirement if you’re considering the 16 GB version of the new iPad.

Another thing to consider: with the new iPad, you’ll obviously want HD versions of movies and TV shows and those tend to be twice the size of the standard definition versions. Apple adding movies as a part of iCloud (they previously added TV shows) mitigates some of this, but it’s still something to note.

So how do HD movies look on the new screen? Very good, but not perfect. Remember, the new iPad has a resolution of 2048-by-1536 — that’s significantly higher quality than the top-of-the-line 1080p movies (which Apple now offers). Amazingly, the iPad has more pixels than my 60-inch HD television which has a resolution of 1920-by-1080. But unless Hollywood starts making 1536p videos, which is highly unlikely (though eventually, they’ll go even higher), movies will not be Retina-ready.

On the iPad I’m testing out, I have three pages of apps, a few hundred photos, one HD movie, and one music album. It’s really not that much stuff, but it takes up over 20 GB of storage. The apps alone are over 10 GB of that.

 

One thing that is surprisingly lacking on the software side of things is Siri. When Apple’s digital personal assistant launched with the iPhone 4S, many assumed it would make its way to new (and faster) iPad as well. For some reason, Apple has chosen not to do that, at least not yet (the popular theory is that they’re still working on scaling issues with the product in beta). One key component of Siri did make the jump however: Dictation. Clicking the microphone button on the virtual keyboard allows you to talk rather than type wherever there is a text input box. It works well.

I would not be shocked to see Siri come to this version of the iPad in a software update somewhere down the line.

Features and technical aspects aside, how does the new iPad feel? Amazing. It’s the best device out there, made even better. And it’s the same price as it previously was. There’s really nothing not to like beyond a few minor nitpicks.

Leading up to the new iPad unveiling last week, several folks (including myself) predicted the inevitable post-event let-down. The reason is obvious: Apple is a victim of their own success. Because the iPad 2 is already so much better than the competition (and you could certainly argue that the iPad 1 still is as well), the only device Apple could beat is their own. And the iPad 2 was already really good and hard to top.

 

And because the new iPad looks largely the same at the iPad 2 from an industrial design perspective, many were lulled into believing that Apple was getting complacent. Let me be clear: the new iPad is a huge technological leap forward. It has by far the best screen I’ve ever seen anywhere and it’s something I can hold in my hand and touch and use for 10 hours at a time.

Remember a few years ago when everyone was using CRT monitors with resolutions of 800-by-600? They needed to be plugged in and to sit on a desk with plenty of room behind it. And they weighed upwards of 30 pounds. Think about that when you hold this new iPad.

And think about the days — again, just a few years ago — when most people connected to the Internet via dial-up connections. Speeds were 14.4 kbps or 56 kbps and required a phone landline. This new iPad will connect to the Internet all over the United States at speeds faster than my current broadband connection. And it can do that for about 9 hours without being recharged.

Technology is amazing, and this new iPad is amazing. Also amazing: the only company competing with Apple right now in this particular space is Apple. So the only real question is: do you upgrade if you have a previous iPad model?

If you have the original iPad, I say this is a no-brainer. If you have an iPad 2, it’s a tougher call since it still seems nearly as fast as the new iPad. But if you choose not to upgrade (or to spend $399 for the 16 GB iPad 2 now), again, treat the new iPad as if it were Medusa when you’re in an Apple Store. Do. Not. Look. At. It.

If you’re at all interested in LTE in an Apple product, obviously, get a new iPad. If you read a lot on your iPad, get the new iPad. If you take a lot of photos and videos (yeah you, the joker in the front row of the concert with your iPad in the air), get the new iPad. If you play a lot of games on the iPad, get the new iPad.

If you don’t yet have an iPad, get the new iPad.

 

The new iPad screen: 

The iPad 2 screen:  

 

Photo taken with new iPad: 

Photo taken with iPad 2: 

 

The old Tweetbot icon up-close on the iPad 2: 

 

The new Tweetbot icon up-close on the new iPad: