fatbrit

It's where I get all my advice on electronics, too.

Bob

He's right. There's nothing in the new one that is earth shattering...the camera in v2 is good enough and if you're using it for Skype, the front facing camera is the same, so there's no difference. Huge difference in the rear facing but who wants to use the ipad as a camera?

The extra res in the display, nice but not really earth shattering at that size and the extra power, well that's all lost pushing the extra display so you're really not gaining any extra performance.

I think the ipad is great if you're getting 3G/LTE and going to be online with data so have access to the cloud all the time, or you're going to be mainly using it at home.

If you're getting the wifi only, or going to be travelling a lot and using it for entertainment, I wouldn't bother, because you can't use it as a hard drive to store content, conveniently at least.

fatbrit

Yep -- Mrs FB's tablet rarely leaves the couch. If travelling, a laptop is much more versatile.

Ash UK/US

Not sure if you are being sarcastic or not but just to be clear it was one of many reviews/opinions and intersting that it was the only one, of the 4 I mentioned to the salesman, that he advised against.

fatbrit

Best place for electronics reviews are Newegg and Amazon users. And even then take them with a pinch of salt unless there are a fair number of consistent reviews.

HarryTheSpider

If you want this for surfing, watching video and listening to music etc, doing some light typing (email, minor edits of work documents etc) then the iPad is very fine.

This issue of using it as a hard drive is a red herring IF you don't need this facility - a cheap $8 flash drive will do that for you easily, AND you CAN use the iPad for this anyway... A $1.99 will do this for you IF you need it... And it sounds like you don't.

I have an iPad 2, see no reason just now for ipad3. If I was buying new I might go for the 3 just because...

As a result of this thread I've become more aware of what is out there and I have to say I'm more convinced than ever about going the iPod route, and I don't care how evil Apple is, 'cos they're all the same.

For what I do, same as your needs, pls I deliver presentations etc on mine, the iPad just works, very little bother etc, and is very well made. The difference in price with other cheaper tablets is not worth the lower quality, and the extra bells & whistles Android gives you, I just don't need.

You buy what you want - I suspect you've got enough different views now...

Enjoy!!

fatbrit

Nope!

You wouldn't say I might as well not vote as all politicians are the same, would you? Not all corporations are the same, either! And nor do all corporations stay the same.

If you chose to buy Apple or shop at Walmart despite knowing their particular evil, then you are voting with your money. It is difficult to chose another manufacturer or retailer who is less evil.

Bob

It's not a red herring though, for the reason I mentioned. If you do intend to travel, whether on plane or by car and you want to chuck a few movies on it for the kids while on the go, it isn't convenient unless you've got decent 3G/LTE to make use of the cloud storage.

Getting the USB or SD adapter isn't exactly cheap and doesn't work that well, on the iPad3 at least.

The folks have the adapter, it only read one USB thumb drive out of 6, these aren't weird brands either, PNY, Scandisk and a couple other brands and the same happened with the SD cards, though only tested it with 4 in that instance and none of them worked.

fatbrit

Not a surprise. The only access to the outside world is the App Store. Everything else in Apple Land is strictly verboten.

HarryTheSpider

@Bob, the iPad does not store videos and music etc in the Cloud unless you specifically tell it to.

You can download stuff to your iPad via iTunes, and you can put your own stuff in to iTunes, you don't have to get it online - none of my nearly 2Tb of videos that I watch on my iPad is from Apple, but I put it there using iTunes - for free.

I agree you are limited by its fixed storage size. 16gb of the bottom of the range iPad will let you have around 30 hrs of video - enough even for travelling London to Sydney...

@fatbrit - the evil of Apple ref: high margins on its products, use of contract equipment manufacturers etc - these are the same as the other manufacturers, the only variable being the amount of profit Apple can squeeze from its products.

The narcissism of Steve Jobs etc that you previously revered to - I just don't care, even if it's true - it's not a requirement/criteria for me - it's a matter of personal opinion, and I'm not saying you are wrong, I'm just saying that this is not a factor in my decision making process. May be that is my bad - again, a matter of opinion and I wouldn't argue with you on that. The features that the other tablets offer simply do not translate into benefits that I care about at the moment. If my list of requirements changes and Apple can't meet them, then I'll be buying something else. At the moment my list of requirements is best met by Apple - but not perfectly so, not by a long chalk. Adding a memory card slot would cost Apple little in terms of unit build cost - and would strip them of the sales and more importantly, the extra margin for the 32 Gb & 64Gb devices. That peeves me, but not enough to go with an alternative, because my device is big enough, and swapping out films & songs is not a hassle for me at the moment.

Bob

So the in-laws have had the iPad3 a little while now and here's a bit of a brain dump.

When they bought it online, they got all the recommended accessories, the USB/SD adapter, the case with the folding ribs, blue tooth keyboard and a AppleTV.

A lot of the problems stem from false expectations, that they have a Apple Mac and a bunch of iPods and generally don't have a problem and expect everything to work and work easily, just syncing stuff up.

They also have a older OSX, 10.5.* whatever the last one was before you had to pay for the upgrade and I think the biggest issue apart from false expectations is this.

What they expected to happen:

Open box, plug into laptop, export mailbox and email settings and have that up and running. This didn't happen, because they had no way to import the mailbox and because they don't use gmail/hotmail etc, but their ISP email it was a hassle to set up. They couldn't sync up via the iCloud because they don't have that option, but Mobile Me, should have worked but as you know, it's been switched off. They thought it would punt to iCloud, it doesn't, it crashes the email program when it times out, after pinging MM for 5 minutes or whatever it was.

Photo's. They expected the pad to have iPhoto and to be able to either sync or import the photo albums from the laptop, so they could use it as a photo frame. iPhoto is not on the thing, it's not a free app. They then expected to be able to sync photo's via iTunes, but they couldn't. They then expected iPhoto on laptop to export and tidily do so the photo albums and to then drag them to the pad, which didn't happen. iPhoto exports the photos out into the base folders that they were imported from the camera at the time, so they then went to the "folders" on iPhoto and exported into a "album" folder they created on the desktop and then went to stick on a thumb drive to copy over, but as mentioned earlier, wasn't easy as most drives just didn't get read.

Video's. They expected to add their vids to iTunes and sync or just copy them over. These were home vid dvd's of the kids ripped to hard drive as well as some other none iTunes acquired vids. iTunes on their version of the Mac wouldn't add them and they couldn't drag them over even from a thumb drive.

They also had hoped that stuff they put on to the iPad would have magic make it work with their Blu Ray, so I got them a free DNLA server app, but as they weren't able to get videos to the thing this is moot and they can't use it to push stuff from any cloud services such as Netflix or whatever because there's no multitasking. I'm guessing they will have to actually set up the AppleTV to get this to work, but it shouldn't be needed. There should be a bog standard HDMI socket to just plug into the tele as a simple solution, but there isn't one.

Music. The stuff added to iTunes did sync over and that worked really well. They did want to use Google Play and stick them up on Google Cloud to save on storage on the iPad, but there are no Google Music apps that work any more.

Documents. They expected to be able to drag those over, so they could open up word processing stuff to read, but couldn't - Google Docs, kind of worked as a work around for this.

Random stuff -

The case they got is shit, really easy to slip off the Pad, really awkward to fold so that they could prop the Pad up to Skype. I know there are much better cases out there, but this was the one that popped up on the site.

The bluetooth keyboard, they couldn't figure it out to set up, but that was them, it was easy and it works really well, I think that's great. So much nicer to use than typing on the screen, which feels really clunky and cumbersome, but good enough to punch in a url or quick message.

The wifi was really quite easy to set up and works really well.

Getting apps is pretty easy, but not so easy to scroll through the default number on the screen, nor to get around to other apps once you've searched. Also the expectation that these are on the App Store, so should just work and be faultless didn't happen. Evernote has to be re-installed nearly every other go, PhotoBucket is similar and same with Pinterest. A whole bunch of games just hang, most of those I think are related to having that leaderboard/achievement thing which allows them to play without signing up an account which they haven't done, but causes them to crash. Sure, that's not Apples fault, that's the developers, but who cares, they shouldn't be approved if they're junk. Shear number of apps though, can't beat that, it's a little over whelming, but a lot of good stuff for free or cheap.

Skype, front facing camera should be good, but it's junk. Shame, because the rear facing is seriously awesome!

Battery life, really not to bad and neither is the charging, it does need to be plugged in over night for a full charge, but that's not really a big thing.

Browsing the web, without flash, hasn't really been a major problem and works pretty well. I don't like Safari and preferred Dolphin? But either way, works really well, scaling of sites is very cool.

Email, the default program is shit, very cumbersome and just not very tidy and can't be replaced I don't think. Would be great to use something like gmail to get to the email, but then the gmail interface is a bit gash on the thing too.

Touch interface, really nice, especially if you like sketching type apps. Really easy to use, plenty of choice and generally work great, awesome use for it.

WiiMote. The folks saw it online being used as a controller for a game, thought it would be easy as it's just another bluetooth device. Well it hasn't worked, I haven't looked into it because I can't be arsed but no doubt I will over Easter. Any tips?

Cleaning the screen...how do you lot do it? It's a finger print smudging magnet and a bit minging. This isn't just the iPad though as it happens with everything...but what won't make a mess?

All in one remote? I haven't looked, but they hoped to be able to use it as one for their Bose/BluRay/Satellite/DVD-VHS stuff. The satellite is Direct TV I think, got the app, but it's hit or miss on working and they were hoping to have just one app to control everything, so any ideas?

Over all, they like it, it does a lot of what they wanted from it but were disappointed by how uneasy it actually was to set up from their own Apple expectations and realising that it isn't going to be practical to be used as a replacement for their laptop. Me, I thought it was supposed to be idiot proof and shouldn't be a problem...it took me 14 hours to get them squared away and that's with MIL using Mac's all day for work as a art teacher so not completely a technoob....they need better Mac support over the phone me thinks, because the support in the stores is fantastic, but they're 4.5hrs away from the nearest store.

I don't think a tablet, regardless of the brand is right for them and told them in advance but they were too Mac stubborn. The iPad3 is over priced for what it offers over iPad2 and is a bit of a massive waste, it's lovely, but seriously, iPad2 is much better value for money and for dodgy after market accessories.

HarryTheSpider

Bob - thanks for the detailed dump.

You've raised an interesting point there about expectations...

Has Apple created a lurking monster with all this, I wonder?

Bob

To some extent, but then it is a yes/no kind of answer.

I think the Apple expectation is that you will go out and buy the newest bit of hardware to replace the 8 month old previous bit of kit you spent a fortune on. In that case, the expectation holds because upgrading/syncing works really well.

If on the other hand, you, the consumer have the expectation that because it is Apple and the product will last years, so you don't need to go get that new upgrade straight away, you will have problems. Upgrading/syncing to a new device when you have one that is more than a couple versions down can and in this instance has become a major chore.

The expectation if this had been any other device, Windows especially, would be "this is going to be a hassle", so it wouldn't bother you other than being a bit of a chore and you'd be surprised if it worked out easier. This is Apple though and they build up this expectation that they are just a better product and so it will just work, which is great when it does, but when it doesn't your expectation of failure feels just that much bigger I think.

BritishGuy36

Huh?

Android 4.0 is already available for the Transformer. What led you to suspect issues with 'build quality' ...? I've found it to be extremely solid and robust. And I have not heard of any real issues with GPS either.

BritishGuy36

No offense intended, but if you think that anyone who works at BestBuy is an authority on anything then it just shows that you need to learn more about the products and about what places are the best to get advice.

BestBuy sell Belkin wireless routers and tell everything that they are great, that in itself says something.

Don't listen to anything BestBuy tell you, find out from the majority of customer reviews (you can safely ignore any single instance of a really over the top bad review, since that person's experience is obviously biased by the fact they ended up with the lemon in the bunch). And you can always ask on computing forums if you have more specific questions.