iPad 2

It's probably not a surprise to anyone who knows me that I got an iPad 2.

I actually wasn't planning on getting one, I was going to wait for the iPad 3, but Jamie decided to surprise me on my birthday. Of course, she had no idea that they aren't exactly easy to get at the moment, tough I think that it's down to a 1-2 week wait now.

I lucked out and picked up one on my birthday by using http://ipad2tracker.com/ to check Target's stock. The one close to work just happened to be the only one around with 2 32 GB WiFi models.

Yes, I went for the WiFi model again. Most of the time I'm either at work or at home and when I need access on the go, I'll just use MyWi on the iPhone to tether. It doesn't make sense to pay the extra to get the 3G Access.

So, on to my thoughts on it.

I really like the design changes in the shape of it. It just feels right in your hand now without a case. And the few ounces of weight that were shaved off defininitely make a difference. Screen wise, it's the same screen, still really nice, but no Retina display.

The speed difference between the original and the new one isn't as dramatic as from the original iPhone and iPhone 3G vs the 3GS and iPhone 4, but it is noticably snappier.

The killer feature of this one is the memory. One of my gripes about the original iPad was that it only had 256 mb of RAM in it, which made the multi-tasking functionality very limited. Sure you could come out of OmniFocus and into a note app or a browser and back with limited taps, but none would still be running when you got there. If I were in a meeting, taking notes with Essay, and someone said something that I needed to lookup via Google or enter as a task in OmniFocus, I would have to wait for OmniFocus to load the database in before it would be ready, or a website I had open to refer to in the browser would have to reload each time I came back into the app. No longer. Now, the iPad has enough RAM to keep an app paused to immediately resume it. That's the killer feature of the iPad 2.

If you're not a power user like that, then I think you can safely skip this generation. Sure it's got a camera in it, but that's not really a big deal to me. The only time I have ever used Facetime is to demo it for my father-in-law.

It does make sense why they limited the original iPad's memory. Most of the new crop of iPad competitors launched with 1GB of memory, and the iPad is blowing them away at half that. By limiting the original iPad to only 256mb of RAM, they forced developers into being as efficient as possible so that when they released the 2nd version, they had a plethora of available apps that ran in 256mb of RAM available, making multitasking a reality with 512 mb. They forced the developers to be smart about their apps' memory consumption.

This iPad is apparently a powerhouse for games, but I haven't really had time to see how that has changed. I know that having the gyroscope feature made some iPhone games better, especially 1st person shooters. I've yet to try that out on the iPad 2.

So in summary, get one if you're multitasker, and then setup the hack to enable to the beta gestures. They make switching apps so much more fluid.