Yes, the iPad 2 is better than the "New" iPad

Yes, the iPad 2 is better than the "New" iPad

Posted on March 28, 2012 - 12:20 by renderle

 

We live in a world of perceptions. This often plays out when Apple rolls out a new product and folks line up to buy it.
Now don’t get me wrong. Like many if not most of you, I simply assumed the iPad 3 was better than the iPad 2. But sometimes it makes sense to go back and consider that newer doesn't necessarily mean better. Remember, like many corporations, Apple has gone through cycles where the new version of a device simply wasn't as good as the old version.
What got me thinking about all this was a note I received from a reader a few days ago. He said he bought the "new" iPad, took it home, compared it to the old one and concluded the iPad 2 was better.  
After he explained why, well, I'll be damned if I didn’t agree with him. Of course, this is far from the first time I’ve felt an older Apple product was actually better.

Past Apple Experiences

Remember the iPad Nano and Shuffle? The Nano got chubby one year, while the Shuffle became so small Apple was forced to put the controls on the headphones which meant aftermarket (read better) headphones wouldn’t work. Fortunately, the next iteration of the Shuffle was slightly bigger.

As you may recall, the second iPhone looked slightly pregnant and the third was plagued by major battery problems - leaving the 3GS as the clear winner. Cupertino then moved to the iPhone 4 with all its antenna and battery problems, subsequently redesigning the 4S to correct various issues and make it a better phone. Looking back, the smart iPhone buyer would have bought the first handset, keeping the device until the 3GS debut, and then hanging onto the smartphone until the 4S hit the streets. The less savy buyer would have bought the iPhone 2, 3, and 4.   

Think about it: Car, appliance, and personal technology companies don’t get every product right - and we certainly know that movie franchises have their ups and downs. Remember Batman Forever? Well, I wish I didn’t.  

iPad 3 vs. iPad 2

The iPad 2 was a nice improvement over the first iPad - lighter sleeker, with optimized performance. Plus, I don’t recall many complaints other than the typical Apple Wi-Fi problems.  By the way, here’s a hint: The best home access points for Apple products are actually Apple access points and they work fine for PCs too. So if you are having Wi-Fi issues, just pick one up you’ll thank me in the morning.

But back to the iPad 3, whose key feature is a very high resolution screen. Yes, it is gorgeous, but weighed down by some major downsides. For example, the Retina display requires more data to push all those pixels so, file sizes and streams are much larger and eat up data plans much more quickly, prompting users to inadvertently max out their data plans in a few days. Frankly, I see no real point to 4G data if you can only use it the first two or three days of the month, or if it costs a small fortune to use it on a continuous basis. In effect, the new bandwidth requirements remove the 4G benefit.
There are also (disputed) reports that the iPad 3 is running hot, but we can just leave those aside for the moment. Simply put, this issue is manageable - either by not laying the thing on your bare legs while gaming or just not running high-res games. However, there is a real issue with the weight of the new iPad and its battery life, as the screen consumes quite a bit of power. Essentially, the iPad 2 gets 8.5 hours while the iPad 3 runs just under 7 hours using a video loop and full screen brightness. (I actually have Ultrabook notebook computers that boast more battery life than the iPad 3).
Yes, the iPad 3's camera is clearly superior to the one found in the iPad 2, but I'm still struggling with the notion of using something as large as the iPad as a camera - particularly when I have a perfectly good camera on my phone. So while it is an improvement, much like a better trailer hitch on a sports car, it isn’t one I’d actually use. This reminds of when Sony came out with a tiny notebook computer with a nice camera on it a few years back. I used the camera for one day, but the glare off the large screen just made it impractical. So yes, the iPad 3 has a better camera, but I’ll bet few folks use it all that much.  

Now onto the iPad 3's whopping big battery. There are definitely some drawbacks here, namely, the battery takes twice as long to charge (this reviewer also had issues with the heat). In fact, one reviewer went on record as saying that iPad 2 owners would likely regret purchasing the newer model.

Let's take a minute and return to the above-mentioned heat issues which were highlighted in various reviews and by Consumer Reports. One of the more dubious theories attempts to blame ongoing litigation with Samsung as the corporation's motivation for striking back at Apple. Personally, I kind of doubt this myself, but suing a major supplier generally doesn’t exactly inspire loyalty.

In terms of weight, the iPad 2 was 15% lighter than the iPad 1 but the iPad 3 is nearly 10% heavier than the iPad 2. In grams, that is 680 for the iPad 1, 601 for the iPad 2, and 644 for the iPad 3. When it comes to tablets, weight is obviously king.

Wrapping Up:  The iPad 2 is Better

Granted, there were folks who believed the iPad 2 didn't offer enough of an improvement over the original device to justify the purchase. I didn’t agree then, but with the 4G data limitations and the file size, power, and weight issues connected to the new display, well, I simply don’t see the iPad 3 as a better tablet - just different. It is also worth noting that a number of iPad 2 owners told me they ended up returning their iPad 3 because it wasn't all that much of an improvement.

In the end, and this isn’t just about Apple, from time to time a vendor may hit a level of perfection they can’t easily beat. When that happens it is best to keep what you have and hope their next attempt better hits the mark. Clearly, if you are an iPad 2 user you already have the better product.

Google patents tech to serve ads based on background noise

In theory Google could listen in on phone conversations and serve ads based on background noise

By Loek Essers

March 22, 2012 10:11 AM ET

3 Comments

IDG News Service - A new Google patent could enable the search giant to base advertising on background noise during phone conversations, although the scope of the patent is much broader.

Google was awarded a patent Tuesday for advertising based on based on "environmental conditions," as the search giant calls it in the patent documents. Advertising can be served on the basis of a sensor that detects temperature, humidity, sound, light or air composition near a device, and ads are served accordingly.
This could mean that if the Google technology detects the sound of the sea, advertisements for beach balls and towels could be served. The ad could be delivered in the form of text image or video, sent to the users' device after detecting the environmental conditions. Google plans to connect those conditions with keywords that advertisers can buy.
The patented technology is meant for personal computers, digital billboards, digital kiosks, vending machines and mobile phones. This raises the question whether Google is planning to serve ads based on background noises picked up during phone conversations.
"On the face of it, it can certainly do that", said Peggy Salz, chief analyst and founder of MobileGroove, a company specialized in mobile search and advertising technologies. "But so could Shazam," she added, referring to an app that listens to music being played and matches the sound with a database of songs.
According to Salz, there could be certainly a privacy issue with the newly patented search and advertising technology. "But if you look at it that way there is a privacy issue with everything that is on your phone," she said. "I wouldn't imagine Google doing that without at least informing the users."
Google wasn't keen on responding to questions about the patent's purpose. Google spokesman Mark Jansen said that the company was not willing to speculate about future purposes of newly acquired patents.
"We file patent requests for numerous ideas our employees dream up," he explained, emphasizing that not all ideas turn into products. "Product announcements cannot simply be inferred from our patent applications."
Google notes in the patent documents that users should be provided with privacy options when the technique is used, and have the option to turn it off.
Apart from the privacy issue, Salz said the new patent is interesting on several levels. "It is always interesting when a big player does something like this," she said. If Google is looking into technology that serves ads based on sounds, light or air composition, that proves that Google is taking multimodal search seriously, she added.
Multimodal search uses different methods to get a relevant result. Instead of only using text search, it can also analyze images or detect sounds. Several companies have been developing these kind of search algorithms. "But it only becomes very interesting when a big company does that," Salz said. She pointed out that voice search has been around for some years, but only really took off when Apple introduced Siri, a voice search agent integrated with the iPhone 4S.
"This is recognition of the importance of multimodal search," Salz added. Users will probably see implications of the new patent in the future. "They don't do anything off-the-cuff," she said. " When Google does something, than that is the thing to do."
Loek covers all things tech for the IDG News Service. Follow him on Twitter at @loekessers or email tips and comments to loek_essers@idg.com

IPAD 3 overheat issue

payup

Re: New iPad overheating?

Mar 19, 2012 11:52 AM (in response to faatty)

Same issue here. Considering returning it and getting a 4G hotspot instead. Retina screen is pretty and all, but it's useless if you can't hold it in your hand without welding mittens on.

Attemptnig to drain the battery down to zero as some suggested right now. Been running a 3d intensive retina game with brightness all the way up for a while, will see if it fixes it.

IPAD 16GB vs. 32GB vs.64GB - worth to repeat

Mar 22, 2010, 12:26 PM

#73

samcraig macrumors 601 Join Date: Jun 2009

Coming from a marketing/sales (business psychology) point of view - the 32gig was designed to upsell most people. And it's obviously working based on posts in this thread of the 64gig only being $100 more. Apple priced the 32gig in such a way that it didn't make sense to buy one UNLESS money was really an important reason. You have your inexpensive but powerful entry model. You have your high tier model. And then you create one in between that makes "sense" but pushes people to just spend a "little more" and get 64gig. Had they not done this, more people that are getting the 64gig would have just gotten the 16gig. And you can argue that. But believe me - with the price points being what they are - for the average joe - the incentive to spend more isn't as great UNLESS you're comparing it to the middle tier. Apple isn't the first company nor the last to employ this type of pricing structure. Look at the wireless networks. It's $5 for 200 txts, $15 for 1500 texts or $20 for unlimited. Most people will just say - hey - for $5 I won't have to worry/count texts. Count me in. Same price point structure for small, large and super sized drinks/fries/etc Some people WILL buy what they want/need. Most will base their opinion or bang for their buck overall.

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/after-244-years-encyclopaedia-britannica-stops-the-presses/?partner=rss&emc=rss

March 13, 2012, 5:54 pm

After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

By JULIE BOSMAN

Ángel Franco/The New York TimesA set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the shelves of the New York Public Library.

After 244 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica is going out of print.
Those coolly authoritative, gold-lettered reference books that were once sold door-to-door by a fleet of traveling salesmen and displayed as proud fixtures in American homes will be discontinued, company executives said.
In an acknowledgment of the realities of the digital age — and of competition from the Web site Wikipedia — Encyclopaedia Britannica will focus primarily on its online encyclopedias and educational curriculum for schools. The last print version is the 32-volume 2010 edition, which weighs 129 pounds and includes new entries on global warming and the Human Genome Project.
“It’s a rite of passage in this new era,” Jorge Cauz, the president of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., a company based in Chicago, said in an interview. “Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now. The Web site is continuously updated, it’s much more expansive and it has multimedia.”
In the 1950s, having the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the bookshelf was akin to a station wagon in the garage or a black-and-white Zenith in the den, a possession coveted for its usefulness and as a goalpost for an aspirational middle class. Buying a set was often a financial stretch, and many families had to pay for it in monthly installments.
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But in recent years, print reference books have been almost completely overtaken by the Internet and its vast spread of resources, including specialized Web sites and the hugely popular — and free — online encyclopedia Wikipedia.
Since it was started 11 years ago, Wikipedia has moved a long way toward replacing the authority of experts with the wisdom of the crowds. The site is now written and edited by tens of thousands of contributors around the world, and it has been gradually accepted as a largely accurate and comprehensive source, even by many scholars and academics.
Wikipedia also regularly meets the 21st-century mandate of providing instantly updated material. And it has nearly four million articles in English, including some on pop culture topics that would not be considered worthy of a mention in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Mr. Cauz said that he believed Britannica’s competitive advantage with Wikipedia came from its prestigious sources, its carefully edited entries and the trust that was tied to the brand.
“We have very different value propositions,” Mr. Cauz said. “Britannica is going to be smaller. We cannot deal with every single cartoon character, we cannot deal with every love life of every celebrity. But we need to have an alternative where facts really matter. Britannica won’t be able to be as large, but it will always be factually correct.”
But one widely publicized study, published in 2005 by Nature, called into question Britannica’s presumed accuracy advantage over Wikipedia. The study said that out of 42 competing entries, Wikipedia made an average of four errors in each article, and Britannica three. Britannica responded with a lengthy rebuttal saying the study was error-laden and “completely without merit.”
The Britannica, the oldest continuously published encyclopedia in the English language, has become a luxury item with a $1,395 price tag. It is frequently bought by embassies, libraries and research institutions, and by well-educated, upscale consumers who felt an attachment to the set of bound volumes. Only 8,000 sets of the 2010 edition have been sold, and the remaining 4,000 have been stored in a warehouse until they are bought.
The 2010 edition had more than 4,000 contributors, including Arnold Palmer (who wrote the entry on the Masters tournament) and Panthea Reid, professor emeritus at Louisiana State University and author of the biography “Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf” (who wrote about Virginia Woolf).
Sales of the Britannica peaked in 1990, when 120,000 sets were sold in the United States. But now print encyclopedias account for less than 1 percent of the Britannica’s revenue. About 85 percent of revenue comes from selling curriculum products in subjects like math, science and the English language; 15 percent comes from subscriptions to the Web site, the company said.
About half a million households pay a $70 annual fee for the online subscription, which includes access to the full database of articles, videos, original documents and to the company’s mobile applications. At least one other general-interest encyclopedia in the United States, the World Book, is still printing a 22-volume yearly edition, said Jennifer Parello, a spokeswoman for World Book Inc. She declined to provide sales figures but said the encyclopedia was bought primarily by schools and libraries.
Gary Marchionini, the dean of the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said the fading of print encyclopedias was “an inexorable trend that will continue.”
“There’s more comprehensive material available on the Web,” Mr. Marchionini said. “The thing that you get from an encyclopedia is one of the best scholars in the world writing a description of that phenomenon or that object, but you’re still getting just one point of view. Anything worth discussing in life is worth getting more than one point of view.”
Many librarians say that while they have rapidly shifted money and resources to digital materials, print still has a place. Academic libraries tend to keep many sets of specialized encyclopedias on their shelves, like volumes on Judaica, folklore, music or philosophy, or encyclopedias that are written in foreign languages and unavailable online.
At the Portland Public Library in Maine, there are still many encyclopedias that the library orders on a regular basis, sometimes every year, said Sonya Durney, a reference librarian. General-interest encyclopedias are often used by students whose teachers require them to occasionally cite print sources, just to practice using print.
“They’re used by anyone who’s learning, anyone who’s new to the country, older patrons, people who aren’t comfortable online,” Ms. Durney said. “There’s a whole demographic of people who are more comfortable with print.”
But many people are discovering that the books have outlived their usefulness. Used editions of encyclopedias are widely available on Craigslist and eBay: more than 1,400 listings for Britannica products were posted on eBay this week.
Charles Fuller, a geography professor who lives in the Chicago suburbs, put his 1992 edition on sale on Craigslist last Sunday. For years, he has neglected the print encyclopedias, he said in an interview, and now prefers to use his iPhone to look up facts quickly. He and his wife are downsizing and relocating to California, he said, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica will not be coming with them, a loss he acknowledges with a hint of wistfulness.
“They’re not obsolete,” Mr. Fuller said. “When I’m doing serious research, I still use the print books. And they look really beautiful on the bookshelves.”

http://illusorypromise.wordpress.com/2012/03/07/a-guide-to-humanitys-next-100000-years/

A Guide To Humanity’s Next 100,000 Years

07/03/2012 Leave a Comment

New Scientist: The Deep Future

I picked up the current issue of New Scientist (03 March 2012, #2854) at the weekend and it’s been a thought-provoking companion throughout the last few days. With a retina-piercing dayglo cover washing out everything else on the magazine shelves, the reader is clearly supposed to take notice of the issue’s special feature on the ‘Deep Future’. What’s that, you say? Well it’s a very long time… a very, very long time. In fact, Deep Time is a term you’ll be hard-pressed to find outside of science fiction (Alastair Reynolds’s House of Suns comes to mind) or the scholarly literature of geology or evolutionary ecology. It requires the kind of perspective typically lacking in the human animal, the ability to replace our selfish, short-term goals and gains with ‘forecasts about the situations in which out descendants will find themselves’.
Writing previously New Scientist (05 Sep. 2007, p. 51) Princeton astrophysicist J. Richard Gott gives good odds that Humanity could be around anywhere up to 7.8 million years. Mind-blowing for sure, but as the IUCN Red List points out, ‘Humans have the widest distribution of any terrestrial mammal species’; based on that alone our very long term survival is far from impossible (and, as the Red List goes on, the sky isn’t even a limit for us as ‘a small group of humans has been introduced to space, where they inhabit the International Space Station’; I just love how that’s phrased).
Now a span of millions of years is difficult to comprehend and so New Scientist confines itself to a much more reasonable timescale: the next 100,000 years, a mere fifty times as long as the Gregorian calendar has clocked up so far or a little over eight times as long as agriculture has been around. I’m sure you’re thinking that still provides plenty of opportunities for things to go wrong, however the first thing I notice about the ‘Deep Future’ feature is how incredibly optimistic it is. The issue’s thesis is never framed as ‘will we still be here?’ but instead ‘why we’ll still be here’, ‘what we’ll be like’, ‘what we speak’, ‘where we’ll live’, ‘what out descendants will know about us,’ and so on. Moreover, the introduction to these eight short articles takes the time to refute the usual bogeymen of nuclear war, out-of-control nanotech, viral pandemics, and supervolcano eruptions. Of the latter – which occur every 50,000 years or so – Bill McGuire, director of the Benfield Hazard Research Centre at UCL, says ‘the likely death toll would be in the millions, but it would have to happen twice in that timescale for a realistic chance of human extinction’. Our ‘species may flourish,’ the editorial chimes in, but ‘a great many individuals may not’. That’s the kind of survival we’re talking about, yes, but it’s still nothing to be sniffed at.
On a cosmic scale, ‘solar flares, asteroid strikes, and bursts of gamma rays from supernova explosions or collapsing stars’ may pose significant challenges to the Human race, but there is no question here that future archeologists won’t be digging up our polystyrene cups millennia hence. Uniformly, the New Scientist feature is a much needed rebuttal of the pessimistic thinking which faddishly colours a lot of current thinking about our prospects. It’s understandable that contemporary economic and environmental circumstances have pushed many towards those kinds of worldviews but they restrict us as a species. Recession, war, and climate change all tempt us to gaze into the dystopian navel even though, again, that’s just short term thinking.
‘Will we run out of resources?’, asks Richard Webb’s contribution here, a piece addressed directly to just such pessimistic scaremongering. His answer is a compelling description of how difficult it is to predict the raw materials and fuels our civilization will require in the future. Past efforts to do so – on the scale of decades, let alone centuries – now seem little more than embarrassing footnotes in the history of Futurology (consider Ira Joralemon’s declaration to the Commonwealth Club of California in 1924: ‘The age of electricity and of copper will be short,’ he said, as ‘the copper supply of the world will last hardly a score of years’). Webb’s point is that both our raw materials and our technology are in a constant state of change, with the latter increasingly coming to dictate the former. It’s almost impossible to believe that we won’t find a way to innovate our way around bottlenecks in the supply of raw materials. Keep an eye on the predicted shortages of rare-earth elements over the next few decades. Can’t build iPhones or energy-efficient light bulbs without them? Yeah, we’ll think of something. Whether that will be asteroid mining, nanoscale material manipulation, or something even more exotic is difficult to tell for now, if only because we insist on thinking about the future using already outdated concepts. Still, chin-up, Human race, for while science cannot yet offer us a post-scarcity society, there’s nothing to say that it won’t be able to offer us a taste of that in the coming decades and centuries.
Where Webb’s article looks forward with excitement, Anne-Marie Corley’s essay ‘Where in the cosmos will we explore?’ fumbles its potential in the face of technical challenges and unimaginable distances. Fair enough, this is a science – not a science fiction – magazine, but Corley’s piece talks about ambition without ever really exhibiting it. While no one can argue that realistic Interstellar missions are ‘at least two to five centuries away’, this is the one article in the New Scientist feature which fails to truly engage with the idea of the Deep Future. The usual candidates of Mars, near-Earth asteroids, Titan, and Europa are rolled out as possible destinations, with the 100 Year Starship project getting a mention along the way (even if participants are depicted as starry-eyed dreamers) even so, Corley’s contribution is limited by the kind of present-day thinking Webb’s essay cautions against. There’s no acknowledgement that technology will advance, that our knowledge of physics will increase… No, we’re not likely to circumvent the light-speed barrier but look at the last 100 years alone and tell me that, in the coming centuries, we won’t be able to get the travel time to Alpha Centauri down from the 115,000 years mentioned here.
This lack of either optimism or speculation leaves Corley’s essay feeling out of place. Case in point is the invocation of ‘god, glory, or gold’ as the only motivations for exploration. ‘If history is any guide…’ she writes, seeming to miss the point of this feature entirely. Citing the English Puritans who sailed to America in the 17^th century, she suggests religious groups might be among the first to populate moon bases or Martian settlements. It’s not something I’m going to discount, however I think it requires a tweak: Is it not more likely that the spearhead of off-world or interplanetary colonization is made up of groups choosing to live free from economic persecution, groups wishing to pursue co-operative or socialist alternatives? Their long-term success would require some radical developments to our values and perspective, it’s true, but given the time scales involved it’s not impossible that the society of our science-fictional dreams, that which aims for the betterment of all Humanity, may come into existence sometime in the next 100,000 years.
Similarly downbeat, at least at the start, is Michael Marshall’s article on the future of biodiversity which begins with projections of increasing habitat destruction and, again, climate change over the near term. ‘I don’t have much hope for blue macaws, pandas, rhinos, or tigers,’ Kate Jones of the Institute of Zoology tells him, however the (very) long term perspective is much better. It is likely that life will ‘ultimately’ recover, Marshall says, consulting with the University of Bristol’s Mike Benton on the mass extinctions of the past. Unlike Corley’s use of relatively recent events to predict the future, Marshall looks back further than 500 or a thousand years. With Belton’s help he delves into the deep stratigraphic past: the Permian Extinction 252 million years ago, and, closer to the present, the Cretaceous Extinction 65 million years ago. Though it took an astonishingly long time, nature recovered in all cases, and that’s without Human beings at all. With our help, damaged wetlands can be restored in only two generations, species can be relocated to places where they can thrive, evolutionary engineering is well within our grasp and, with a little forethought and responsibility, it will be possible to build biodiversity hotspots and even completely new ecosystems (something we may need to do anyway if global temperature rises render large swaths of the Earth essentially uninhabitable).
In all, the ‘Deep Future’ essays are a great feature. I say that as someone with an interest in but no formal education in the sciences and so, I guess, someone who’s safely inside New Scientist‘s target demographic. Nonetheless I think I would have enjoyed this feature even if I’d never picked up the magazine before. Equal parts realistic assessment and speculative gazetteer, the tenor of it all appeals to me. To paraphrase the editorial, thinking about the Deep Future is a way of focusing on the challenges of today. There’s a lot the Human race can accomplish and, if we work together, the time ahead ‘is brighter – and more knowable – than it might seem. It’s a soppy sentiment but, honestly, we need to get over ourselves and just embrace it; we need to be more like New Scientist’s bright orange cover: Glowing with positivity.

IPAD 3 released

Maybe I will get a new IPAD or wait for asus transformer 700 ?