Gadgetory

for years rumors abounded about an apple tablet dating all the way back to the days of the iPod excited Apple fans the world round watched as more and more sources and rumors flew all exclaiming a brand-new tablet PC that would do two netbooks and laptops but the iPhone did to the smartphone market the rumors covered everything from a touchscreen MacBook to a 12-inch version of the iPhone On January 27th 2010 Apple CEO Steve Jobs finally announced a long-awaited Apple tablet the iPad with the release of the iPad 2 Apple has improved on the original formula of the impressively popular iPad one in several key areas right off the bat you'll see just how thin the new iPad 2 is and a mere third of an inch thin holding the iPad 2 is just like holding a thin notebook the tapered edges of the tablet slide nicely in your fingers and make the iPad 2 perfect for just lounging back and surfing the web or using apps it is also lighter coming in at a mirror than 1.3 pounds all of this adds up to a great experience in using the iPad the hardware is very clean in true Apple fashion the front is dominated by a nine point seven inch IPS display with a resolution of 1024 by 768 the display which carries everyone from the original iPad is slightly lower resolution than competitors such as the Motorola Xoom however it still looks great with fantastic viewing angles you'll also find the trademark home button which backs you out to the springboard along with a front-facing VGA camera along the sides reside a switch that can mute the iPad or lock the orientation a rocker to turn up and down the volume and on the top you'll find the sleep/wake button and a headphone jack the back of the iPad is a solid piece of aluminum which not only looks great but feels nice in the hand toward the bottom you will find a speaker which is surprisingly loud and clear perfect for watching movies at the top left there is a 0.7 megapixel camera capable of shooting 720p HD video neither camera is particularly great however they serve their purposes before face time speaking of face time Apple's video chatting standard comes with the iPad 2 with it you can video chat with friends who have an iPhone 4 and iPod Touch 4th generation or a Mac with FaceTime installed it generally works really quite well and it's certainly a nice feature to have on the iPad 2 the iPad 2 runs iOS 4.3 the exact same operating system from the iPad 1 which itself is derived from the iPhone it is very simple and intuitive to use with a list of your installed applications on the home screen there are a variety of pre-built apps that come with the iPad including photobooth a YouTube application the iTunes and App Store's Google Maps the iPod player this is for a web browser and more in addition you can download some of the thousands and thousands of apps available on the App Store making the iPad 2 the most compelling tablet as far as apps go while the interface is great and works there are features that could be added Android Honeycomb tablets have a great variety of widgets that can be placed on the home screen which is certainly a feature that the iPad could adopt the technical specs include a new 1 gigahertz dual-core Apple a5 processor along with 512 megabytes of RAM and a power VR SGX 543 MP GPU put together this means that the iPad 2 absolutely screams able to load full desktop web pages in the same time as most laptops and handle very graphically intense games despite all this battery life is really impressive in such a thin package depending on your usage you can expect anywhere from 8 to 11 hours of juice on a single charge typically on the higher end of that and falling perfectly in line with Apple's suggestion of 10 hours so overall what do I think of the iPad 2 well it's a stellar device for viewing the web playing games watching videos and so on the much thinner design makes the iPad 2 great to hold and much thinner than any other tablet on the market today well it's certainly not perfect as the screen could be higher resolution and the cameras could look better as if they were made in something you know not like 1999 overall the iPad 2 offers the best combination of features and design on the market today not even counting the fact that it's considerably less expensive than many of its competitors