AVOID THIS
That's right. It's not a typo. I'm actually telling you to avoid purchasing an Apple product.
If you haven't got an iPad, go buy one - the original. You can save around £400 on the top of the line iPad 2 if you get a brand new top of the line iPad 1 on Ebay.
If you already have an iPad 1, don't upgrade.
Why?
First, let's clear something up:
I love the iPad - I got up at 5am on US launch day (April 3rd, 2010) to get in line and be one of the first to get one - a cool two months before the rest of the UK. I'm not a hater, I love Apple products, and I certainly don't endorse buying the Motorola Xoom or Blackberry Playbook.*
And yet I still stand by the title of this post, for one simple reason. Apple are being lazy. Lazy, cheap and overconfident, knowing that they control over 90% of the market and that there is no legitimate competition from Windows, Android or Palm OS in the tablet market. They have the best product on the market, and they aren't currently under any real pressure to improve. The iPad 2 is a shadow of what it could have been, had Apple not done the admittedly smart move to secure their profit margins.
Apple altered the design, added two terrible cameras and upgraded the processor and graphics processor speed. At face value, this doesn't seem half bad. But when you consider everything Apple could have done and chose not to, probably to save for the iPad 3, consumers aren't getting the greatest deal, not by a long shot.
Apple omitted two key features to the iPad 2, both of which could have been easily implemented - early leaks even suggest they were part of an original draft of the device.
1. Retina Display: the iPad and iPad 2's 720p screen resolution gives it a measly 132 PPI (pixels per inch), compared to the iPhone 4's 326 PPI. This makes a huge difference to the sharpness of text, movies, and pictures. everything on the device looks better - as is easily seen comparing an iPhone 3GS to an iPhone 4.
2. SDXC card port. Seen in a leaked iteration of the iPad 2, this would have been a huge addition to the iPad - no longer would customers have to pay Apple's excruciatingly large upgrade prices to get a larger storage capacity, or connect the iPad Camera Kit in order to easily download photos.
That's it.
That's all Apple needed to add, to make the iPad 2 a vastly superior product to the one it is now. Those two simple additions make such a world of difference to the overall iPad experience that it was lazy and greedy of Apple to leave them out. Despite this, the uneducated masses, and undoubtedly a fair share of the educated masses, will happily gobble up the iPad 2.
That's why I implore you not to. Buying an iPad 2 is giving in, an act of relinquishing common sense and morals for the sake of a meagre technological improvement. Wait for the iPad 3, or buy a hugely discounted iPad 1. But whatever you do, DON'T BUY THE iPAD 2.
*These are comparably expensive products with comparable hardware to the Pad 2 but are nowhere near as polished or well made, especially on the software side.
