I picked up a 16GB Wifi+4g today at a Three store in the UK. Ideally I would have liked a 32GB, but 16GB was all they had left, and whilst I could have waited and kept using my iPad 1G, I really kind of wanted to give that to my mum for Mother's day, so I decided to bite the bullet.
The 16GB Wifi+4g set me back £99, along with a 24month contract that gives me 15gb of data per month for £29/mnth.
I haven't had much of a chance to play with it yet, but here are my initial impressions:
It feels noticeably more comfortable in the hand than the iPad1. This will come as no big news to iPad2 owners, but it's a very nice improvement coming from the first gen device. The tapering of the edges also makes it feel smaller and a lot more comfortable to me.
General responsiveness and speed do feel a lot more zippy than my previous iPad. Once again, I expect this to be on a par with the iPad2, but, once again, it's a very nice improvement over the iPad1, and for the first time in a long time I experienced the joys of typing on an iPad without having to deal with the frustration of lag. Huge bonus!
Now, on to things unique to the new iPad:
First of all - that screen. It is as advertised, and very, very nice. Even holding it at a normal distance and not succumbing to pixel peeping, there is a night and day difference between text in iBooks and text in Kindle (which I can only imagine is because the kindle app has not made the necessary changes to support the retina display yet). Whatever the reason, there is very clear aliasing on the text in the Kindle app, whereas the text in iBooks is wonderful, and, just like my iPhone before it, I have found I can now comfortably reduce the size of the font by one or two notches and still retain the same ease of reading. I exported some photos out of Lightroom and resized them to 2048 pixels along the long edge of the image, and then imported them into iPhoto so I could sync to the iPad (I really wish there were a way of directly syncing from Lightroom!). The level of detail was very impressive. Overall, I am incredibly happy with this screen.
Next, I tried some voice dictation using the new built-in functionality. There's still some quirks that need to be ironed out here. On the whole, it did a pretty good job of correctly interpreting what I was saying for short portions of text. However, a couple of things have left me stumped. Sometimes when I say "full stop" (I'm English, so we use this instead of "period"), it will transcribe the words "full stop". If I say the word "comma", it will *always* just print the word "comma", no matter how many times I try it. The same goes with "question mark". This is kind of a deal breaker right now, and makes the app somewhat unusable in its current state. Hopefully, they release an update very soon that will address these issues, as I can see myself using this quite a bit given how snappy and responsive it felt in usage.
I am now currently putting the battery through a full charge. It came 75% charged out of the box, and I ran it down to 14% before firing up Battery Doctor Pro and plugging it into the mains. I was quite taken aback to see that Battery Doctor is estimating a total time to completion of five and a half hours (this includes a charge to 100%, a phase to complete the cycle to full charge, and then a 10 minute trickle charge). This is quite a bit longer than I was expecting. It's been plugged in for about 90 minutes so far, and the battery has gone from 14% to 43%. However, the "time remaining" indicator is now quoting me 5hrs and 38mins. I don't know if this is the app struggling with the new battery, or whether the battery really has grown so much that it's going to take a *lot* longer to charge this iPad than my old iPad1. I'm really hoping it's a software glitch!
