First of all, sorry for not commenting on the iPad 2 announcement and launch. Partly because I was in the middle of the Alps doing more interesting things than writing about tech, but mostly because I don’t care about it.
I don’t care because it isn’t a very significant upgrade over the first generation iPad. As I said before, it was very polished already for a first generation product. I also don’t care because it won’t shake or reshape the tablet market. Apple is going to be the king there for a while and period. Android tablets haven’t taken off yet and RIM’s Playbook doesn’t come with an e-mail client (WTF?). So if you want a tablet, stick with the iPad for now. If you already have an iPad, don’t bother buying the new one – unless you either plan to use video conferencing a lot, or can get one for free.
After a year since the first iPad came out, I realized two things: it’s a great device for some uses and it’s useless for most people. It’s great if you want a reader or a portable TV. There are several cheap magazine subscriptions on Zinio, plenty of rich content in iPad-designed magazines (i.e. Wired, Time) and it’s a great mate for Apple TV and iTunes (specially now that we can stream videos/audio to it). For musicians, it’s a great sheet music repository – I use GoodReader for my piano studies a lot. Plus, it has iBooks and the Kindle app, so it’s an ebook reader as well. Apart from that and some occasional web browsing and e-mailing, I haven’t used mine for anything else. That’s because Apple released something called the 11” MacBook Air. And then I stopped carrying the iPad around a bit.
I still love the concept of tablets and believe they do some things better than computers or smartphones (like e-reading), but I’d hardly recommend one right away to anyone. What I realized is that the iPad are great for people who either love technology, or those who hate PCs. But for most people, it’s a surplus device. I’d rather recommend the MacBook Air for those. Or the MacBook Pro, since these people think they can’t live without a CD drive or a network cable.
My comments on the iPad 2 and tablets end here. One last message now.
I’ll be writing a lot less about tech this year. Partly because I don’t have time for that, and also because I feel that there aren’t many interesting things going on out there. So, unless there’s something really, really cool being released, I’ll stick to my photography and music writings.