I had a look at one today and thought it was a bit meh. Don't get me wrong, I really like the iPad and the iPad 2 but I just don't think it's much of an upgrade. I didn't see anything that would have made me buy the iPad 2 over the original iPad.

Apple do small upgrades all the time, if you wait for a bug upgrade over the current version you will never get one. The iPhone has been little upgrades though the retina display was a big small upgrade.

Yeah, I think the mobile stuff has tended to be a bit more hop-skip-jump. If you look at the iPods & the iPhone, the way it has worked is it tends to be big upgrade - little upgrade - big upgrade - (etc). You tend to get a new model i.e. a full redesign, then next time round you get an 'upgrade' which is better but not all that different, then you get a full redesign again. That's what's happened with the nano & shuffle and the iPhone.

Macs do tend to be much more 'incremental', I can't remember the last time a Mac model had an entire redesign.. maybe when they went from the iMac G4 to the iMac G5, and that's, well, according to wikipedia that's 2004! The only other time you could suggest is when they went from PPC to Intel and even then they tended to just fit Intel chip main boards in the same cases. Everything in the mac line has been very steady change rather than jumps.

Jon

I will admit that a retina display on the iPad would have made it a winner. It still will be, but even bigger. I also suspect that technologically that might not be possible right now at a sensible price. Though I do think that it will soon enough.

Retina at that size is unrealistic at the moment, because of the processor and the graphics hardware. They would need a much more power hungry processor and graphics processor to display fluid animation on such a high resolution, which would probably drop the battery life to a couple of hours...

I was thinking that it was probably a cost consideration as well. Such screens would be expensive and would not enable Apple to maintain their gross margins and sell it for less than the previous version. That said the iPhone display now will only be replaced by a OLED version at some point, so could almost said to be the end of the line for phone screen development, unless it is cheaper and more efficient.

Honeycomb apps are still a bit thin on the ground.

http://www.mobilebusinessbriefing.com/a ... ay-critics

Only a matter of time I suppose.

or is that 65000 apps that just have been resized for the iPads bigger screen or is that 65000 unique ipad only apps?

That's 65000 apps that have iPad specific GUIs. You can have iphone apps - which the iPad scales the GUI of as a bitmap, which looks fugly - iPad specific apps which won't even install on an iPhone, or 'universal' apps which run on both but present a different GUI depending on the size of screen they're running on. I suspect the 65000 = number of ipad apps + number of universal apps.

If you look at the web catalogue page for a Universal app, there are a pair of radio buttons that show you screenshots running on one or other display. If you look at say the dropbox app for example, you can see the iPad screens aren't just scaled up iPhone screens.

Jon

That is not too shoddy really considering the device was only available from April 3rd last year. Then only in the USA (we had to wait till nearly June). So that is 5000-6000 a month depending on where you are counting from.

Ipad's been on the market for 12 months, Honeycombe came out only this month. Why do people keep going on about this?

A fair comment. Lets see if there are 65000 apps for Honeycombe in a years time.

its quality not quantity that counts. If both systems have high quality apps then everyone is a winner. (well unless you want an iPad and you dont want to be under the thrall of the dark lord Skeletor)

I will accept the quality aspect but wont there be hundreds of fart apps for the new devices soon enough?

One significant difference. Apple showed the iPad and said 'Ok, we're going to get this out the door in three months time' (or whatever it was). And then gave the developers detailed specs and updated the dev environment with an emulator & etc. So essentially devs had three months lead on making iPad-friendly apps before anyone could actually buy an iPad. Result? When the iPad hit the shops there were already about 100 ipad friendly apps, including some very nice stuff and quite serious 'impress your friends' stuff like The Elements. I had an iPad reserved at UK launch, and when I brought it home I already had about a dozen iPad apps on my computer ready to be installed.

Did anyone get the detailed specs of the Xoom three months ahead of launch? I kind of doubt it from the evidence. Were there a lot of tablet-ready apps in the Market Place the day it launched? Well, unlikely, since there's hardly more than a dozen now.

The Android market place and developer community wasn't prepped for Gingerbread and the Xoom & it's cohorts the way the iOS market was for the iPad. As a result, software support for them is yet sparse. Because support is sparse, less people are actually willing to plonk money down for them. Because they're not selling as well, there's less incentive for developers to support them. It's a vicious circle. Because nobody has control over the ecosystem as Apple do with iOS, nobody was able to give the Xoom and the like the helping hand at startup that you need to launch any new product. In this case, the fact the Android ecosystem is diversified has worked against it, not for it. Momentum may build over time but it's definitely been slowed.

Jon