Dave Thorp's Blog

So yesterday saw Steve Job, CEO of Apple announce a new product which turned out to be the widely expected tablet device. Like many others, I was hoping for at least an update to the iPhone OS also if not a new iPhone to be announced and normally these speeches tend to cover one or two products and then have a little surprise at the end. In this case the surprise at the end was that they managed to spend an hour and a half talking about just one product.

So onto the product itself, dubbed by Apple as a revolutionary and magical device, named the iPad (and opening up to a large number of iTampon jokes that actually managed to trend on twitter above anything actually to do with the device or Apple). Ok I haven’t had one in my hands yet but to me it seems that what Apple have done isn’t revolutionary or magical. Indeed this device has been around for nearly three years already and is called the iPod Touch. Because what Apple have done is taken their existing iPod Touch, blown it up to 4 times the size, put a faster chip in it and created some word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software for it.

A lot of people are slating the device because it cant multitask, much like the iPhone and the iPod Touch. Personally, I cant see the appeal of multitasking on a device like this. On my PC currently which can support multitasking, I have the following open

1. Thunderbird – as the mail app on iPad can be set to poll automatically or even push if supported, there is no need to keep mail open on the iPad
2. iTunes – the iPhone will continue playing music even if you exit the iPod app. As the iPad is based on the same OS as the iPhone/Ipod Touch there is no reason this wont still be the case. And I have iTunes open but aren’t even listening to music so no idea why its open
3. Firefox with 12 tabs open – Safari supports multiple tabs on the iPhone so presumably will on the iPad. Of the 12 tabs open half of them don’t need to be, I just haven’t bothered closing them yet
4. Sticky Notes – Fair enough the iPad wont support notes on the desktop BUT of the sticky notes I have the majority of them serve no purpose anyway and there’s no reason they cant be hidden away in an app

The price of the device whilst looking reasonable is unlikely to translate well to the UK as is the normal case with Apple devices. For example based on the US price, the iPod Touch 64GB retails for $399. This should translate to a UK price of £246 but it actually costs £60 more than that.

Based on the US prices, the UK prices of the iPad should be

We’ll see how well that translates over into UK apple money. As for if I’ll be buying one, I can see this device replacing my netbook which as Steve Jobs pointed out is slow and not better than anything BUT that will depend on if

1. The price translates over to the UK well
2. If the Wifi only model will support tethering to the iPhone, something which strangely never got mentioned at the keynote last night

The iPad, whilst being a large iPod touch, probably isn’t too bad a device. I’m just disappointed there was nothing else announced like a new iPhone (though this could be because I was hoping for new iPhone as I have an upgrade due next month)

Oh and anyone buying this as an ebook reader who doesn’t live in the US may want to check the small print at the bottom of THIS PAGE

When the 3GS was first announced, I asked the question was it worth the hype? At that time of course as it wasn’t released, I didn’t have my hands on one. Now I do! So how does it compare to the 3G and is it worth people upgrading? This post will discuss this, as well as be a review of the handset

Appearence

The 3GS appears more or less identical to the 3G. Well in my case that isn’t entirely true as my 3GS has double the capacity of my 3G so has a different number on the back and is a different colour as I opted for the white version this time.

I did expect the white version to be white all over and not just on the back cover. The area surrounding the screen is still black so unless you look at it from behind there is no noticeable difference.

People seem to be raving about the new charger and rightly so as the charger changes from a bulky affair to one that is smaller than a standard electrical plug.

Interface

As is commonly known the new phone is little different in terms of usability from the old 3G with the new 3.0OS. However there is a noticeable speed difference when using the phone and navigating menus and the like.

New features

The much talked about compass seems to do exactly what it says on the tin and integrates with maps nicely. I am slightly concerned however that maps seems to try and determine my location from my home wifi network when at home and wifi is turned on (presumably as GPS always did suffer indoors). This has the nice side effect of banging me two miles to the west and near to PNE football ground rather then where I actually live.

The voice control feature sounds nice but can’t say I’ve tried it yet.

*goes to try it*

Well it seems to do alright. Probably about a 90% hit ratio with what I asked it to do. Would be nice to have the option to play a specific song rather than a playlist, album or artist though. Perhaps in OS 3.1

The camera autofocus seems to work well. I can’t say I’ve noticed much difference in picture quality though. I have not as yet tried the video camera.

I am yet to use MMS on the 3GS as I never was a big picture message user unless they were free and I used them instead of texts (last time that happened was with imode handsets). However as the 3GS’s MMS support is the same as the 3G’s but with video added I’m guessing it will be fine

I have not even attempted to use tethering. People seem to be very put off at O2’s pricing even though and O2 wont even permit its use without buying a bolt on though there is a hack to get round this. O2’s pricing on tethering seems to be on a par with their mobile broadband pricing though and as I already have mobile broadband I cant see me using this much.

So is it worth it?

The extra speed alone probably does make this a worthy upgrade. Voice control is useful though I would like to see the accuracy pick up slightly and additional control options.

However, my original opinion stands, it is not worth people paying silly money to buy the handset on PAYG or even worse buy out their contracts. Thankfully I managed to work round both those problems and went for neither option. The 3G does much that the 3GS does equally well or not much worse. Unless you must have the latest phone or really need the speed boost, voice control, video and a compass you should probably hang fire. The 3GS is an excellent device though, however many people feel that this is what the 3G should have been first time around.

Apple have apparently reported that sales of the 3GS over the first weekend were in the region of 1 million units worldwide. Not sure how that compared with the 3G though an accurate comparison is impossible as many 3G owners were unable to upgrade this time, and stock levels for the 3GS seemed to be higher than they were for the 3G. Not to mention all the technical issues that plagued launch day on the 3G were avoided this time round

Few days ago I predicted the iPhone 3GS was going to be a flop compared to it’s predecessors. Mainly due to O2 pricing it stupidly high and alienating their existing customer base. Seems I was right going off this picture of people queuing for the 3GS compared to people queuing for the original iPhone (which was also stupidly expensive I’ll add).

Full story and original image HERE