My experience using an iPad 2 for a couple of days

My experience using an iPad 2 for a couple of days

So over the past couple of days I have been using my friend's iPad 2 which he lent to me for the weekend to try and show me how much better his iPad was than my playbook because both of us argued for our own tablets. So basically this post is going to be on my personal views on the iPad, iOS and the differences between this and my experience of other tablets on the market today.

I received the tablet on the Friday after college and tethered it up to my phone so I could use the Internet on it and browse through some of the news apps such as Pulse, Flipboard, BBC News and a couple of other news applications that my friend had already downloaded. I was instantly impressed with how solid everything felt, the apps opened up nice and fast and synced nice and fast and scrolled and smooth really nicely; straight away I knew it was going to be harder for me to fight against the iPad when I got back to my Playbook.

I've wanted to convert to an Apple device for about a week snow as I teased with the idea of getting a MacBook pro for my birthday, however this was a little too out of my price range so I directed my interest towards an iPad. Now, the reason I have recently been drawn to Apple products lately is due to the fact that they just work, they do everything that Windows computers can do but they make it so much simpler somehow. What I also like about them is how they all just seem to sync so well together and even if just own one iDevice then it can use the iCloud and iTunes so that your information is always doubled up somewhere and can be accessed from almost anywhere... Oh and all apple devices are freaking beautiful! One thing that I worried about when I thought of converting to an iPad was that my Playbook has an official Microsoft Word application and so it was compatible with my computer that runs Windows. However I wasn't aware at the time that Apple realise this and have brought the iWorks applications to the iPad. iWorks are three applications called Pages (Microsoft Word equivalent), Numbers (Microsoft Excel equivalent) and The Keynote application (Microsoft PowerPoint equivalent.) once I'd found out that the iPad had these applications, I realised that there was no reason not to get an iPad now, so my friend suggested I borrow his iPad for the weekend just to confirm that fact.

Okay so over the past couple of days I've used a wide array of applications most of which my mate had already downloaded, however there were a couple I downloaded. Pages was an application that I found myself using a bit and could easily find myself using more when I get my own iPad. It is (as I mentioned earlier) Apple's answer to Microsoft Word and the documents can even be saved into a .doc file so you can carry it on on your Windows computer. In addition to this helpful feature, the application is very nice, you can choose different templates and then edit around those and it has all the formatting you'll need: bold, italics, bullet points, tab lining, fonts, sizes and paragraph styles are just some of the features you can change in this brilliant application. I've found that viewing news on an iPad is absolutely brilliant too due to the nice big screen. Some nice news apps on the iPad that I used were Flipboard, Pulse and the BBC News application which were all set out beautifully, and just like the majority of the other applications, scrolled beautifully and the animations were really nice too. Apart from reading News, I obviously played some games too such as Modern Combat 3, GTA 3, Bike Baron, Infinirty Blade 2 and of course some little Angry Birds too. All these games played beautifully and I was particularly impressed with the graphic quality on the likes of GTA and Modern Combat, two games that I reckon The new iPad would have no problem handling whatsoever with its new quad-core graphics.

To sum up, the application range on iOS is far and beyond than any other application market you'll find on any other tablet. Plus you have the security that 97% of the major games that come out are going to be on the iOS platform first. The productivity applications are actually brilliant, I was initially worried that I wouldn't be able to get my school work synced from my computer onto my iPad and was pleasantly surprised to see the amount of applications that smoothly interacted with the Windows Desktop platform. The games on the iOS platform are like no other on any other platform, you'll have deep amount of choice even for the iPad which has like a fifth of the amount of apps as the iPhone.

Now let's talk about the new iPad 3rd generation that was released and which I put up an article about a couple of weeks ago which you can find here. First off, I'm most excited about the retina display, I luckily got the chance to go into my local Apple store on the launch day and play with one of the new iPads and see its new retina display in all it's technicolor glory and it's genuinely the most impressive display in the world right now. How to describe to you is easy, you know on the iPad adverts where the screen is really bright and looks really freaking nice and perfect when they play with apps or watch movies... Well this retina display is like that in person, truly the best display around. The second thing I'm excited about is obviously the quad-core graphics engine, unfortunately I didn't get the play with any quad-core retina-made applications whilst in the store so I can't note about that. However, I have seen videos of games playing on the retina display (which I had to play in 1080p to get the real feel) and they do look truly incredible.

Now one thing you'll notice I haven't mentioned is the actual iOS platform, the reason for this is everybody knows what the platform is like. It is buttery smooth and solid as hell and just in general, if you buy an Apple product (unless you drop it) you won't be disappointed with your purchase.

I shall be purchasing the White 32GB iPad for my birthday on the 11th April, now seeing as it'll be my birthday, I won't be able to write anything about it for the next couple of days, but I should hopefully have something up by that weekend. The sort of things I'll be writing are are a First Impressions article about the weight, size, the retina display, the games and the general use of the display. I may do a specific article on just the display also as that is the main selling feature for a lot of people. And then finally, I will have my review of the Apple iPad in all it's beauty!

I hope you've enjoyed reading this article which, as it turns out, didn't actually have a main point, I just wanted to rant about my use of an iPad for the past two days and talk about the new iPad also. You can ask me any questions on Twitter @l_harkness or post a comment on this blog below and ask me a question that way. Thank you for reading it's a nerd's life!