Apple iPad (2012)

MRP: 30500

Summary

If you are an iPad 'one' user, or a user of any other tablet available in the market, then you should consider the upgrade to the New iPad. If you are an iPad 2 user however, we suggest you skip this iteration and wait for the fourth generation iPad as that will be a better value for money upgrade for you.

Design

If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it! We placed the New iPad and the iPad 2 in the hands of virtually everyone who walked into our lab and while the display was off, none of the users could make out the difference between the 2 devices. Some of the people who were iPad 2 users complained about one being heavier than the other and they guessed which was which.

Display

What will make your jaw drop to the ground is the new Retina Display. Once you switch on the display, there is no going back to whatever tablet you used before this. It’s the same experience users had when they decided to switch from the iPhone 3GS or any other smartphone to the iPhone 4.

No matter how close you go to the screen of the New iPad or how much you zoom into the text, you will see no pixilation. The resolution of the 9.7-inch display is 2048x 536. That’s 264 PPI (Pixels Per Inch). The Retina Display is twice the resolution of the iPad 2, which sports a resolution of 1024 x 768 (132 PPI).

To the naked eye, the display on the New iPad may seem slightly less bright when compared to the iPad 2, but we have never seen a crisper display on any device.

New Features to iOS

iOS has seen its fair share of tweaks since its inception and Siri was one of the biggest highlights last year when Apple announced the iPhone 4S. We all expected to see Apple’s voice controlled personal assistant make an appearance on the New iPad, but we were all left a little disappointed. Instead, Apple has added a simple voice dictation feature to the device.

Users can tap the microphone icon to the left of the keyboard, dictate, hit the button again and viola! The device understands what you say. Well almost...When we tried the dictation app with our Indian accent, we were not very successful. The app refused to identify a lot of neutral words and if you try to dictate Indian names and places, be prepared to pull your hair out!

As awesome as the dictation feature is in an American accent, it is equally frustrating in an Indian accent.