Apple released their first iPad about a year ago. The first iPad brought the tablet PC industry to life, and caused both consumers and manufactures to sit up and take notice. Tablets are now in their own class, between laptops and smartphones. Interest in Tablet PC's can be tracked to the iPad, even though it wasn't the first one.
It's been over a year now, and while Apple had a large lead in the tablet market, other PC tablet makers are starting to catch up. Apple is now releasing the iPad2 to try to stave off the competition. The iPad2, like all of Apple's other products, is highly anticipated, so in light of this, here are a few of the differences between the iPad and the new iPad2, to help consumers choose the right product.
With every new Apple product released, you can bet the new product is better than anything the market has seen before. While some upgrades are minor, others are pretty major, with all kinds of new bells and whistles being added. This is one of the reason Apple holds such a large market share in hand held devices. While other manufacturers are catching up with the iPad on a technical level, the iPad2's slick look and feel should give them an edge in the market.
The iPad2 looks similar to the iPad, which is sort of surprising, since Apple is known for it's design innovations. The only difference in appearance is that the Apple iPad2 is sleeker and thinner, making it less bulky. The advances in the new iPad2 can be traced back to the Macbook Air, which was designed to be as this as possible. The new thinner design lowers the weight of the iPad2 by around 3 ounces.
Here's a partial list of the new upgrades in the iPad2. The new processor is an A5 dual core chip instead of the old A4, which had only a single core, and was slower. Random access memory has been increased from 256MB to 512MB. The new "2" also has a gyroscope to help with screen orientation problems that occurred in the old iPad.
The only downside of the new iPad is that its screen is still the same as the old one. On the plus side, Apple promises that the device will use a new and improved graphics engine which can provide a faster refresh rate and better graphics than the previous one.
So, the question of the day is, old iPad for $200 off of eBay, or new iPad2 for $900 with all the bells and whistles from the Apple store?
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