Matt Buchanan — Here's the simple truth about the iPad 2: There is nothing else like it. Maybe it won't make you feel the way it makes me feel. Maybe it won't replace your laptop. Maybe it could be even thinner and lighter and faster. But there is nothing else like it
Frankly, the iPad is still the only tablet that really matters. It's the only tablet designed by and for human beings. It's strange to call it a tablet, almost, because that makes it sound weirdly cold, distant and impersonal (or medicinal, even), when it is the opposite of those things: It is perhaps the most deeply personal computer that exists, after smartphones.This is the tablet every other tablet is trying so hard to be, or at least be like. Maybe each one has its own thing—the Xoom is very good at Gmail!—but they all exist, right now, because this does
only took 30 seconds. I had this jolt. Then I was profoundly sad.
The iPad 2 is not quite unpossibly thin, but it is improbably so. And while the first iPad was fast enough, I guess, it was not quick. This is. Everything is faster, every response, every action—every app explodes to life with newfound zippiness. Switching back and forth between them is nimbler and more seamless, more like it should be—thanks to the extra memory,
apps aren't mercilessly killed in the background, needing to be constantly re-vivified.
The sadness comes from realizing that no, there's not even anything close to it. Shaving .17 pounds off the first iPad's weight of 1.5 pounds, down to 1.33 pounds, doesn't sound like much on paper, but the difference is striking. The 1.6-pound Xoom feels leaden by comparison—the interplay between dimensions, proportions and weight works as much against the Xoom as it does for the iPad. But I still want the iPad to be lighter. (It's already crystalline how bloated and clumsy today's tablets are going to feel in a couple years.)
There's this weird contingent of neck-bearded people who think that software that is easy to use is necessarily bad and for "retards." They are ridiculous. Even while iOS has its limits—multitasking isn't quite as brisk as Android 3.0, or as neatly devised as the upcoming Palm TouchPad's looks—it remains the only software for existing tablets that's genuinely intuitive and pleasant to use, through and through. (At least until you smack into something it can't do.) Point being, when I'm done doing things at the end of the day on a laptop, I'd much rather use an iPad 2 than a Xoom, whose software feels disjointed, incomplete and, for lack of a better word, heavy. Which is meaningful,
I think.And while the iPad is not very good yet at things like programming or creating office documents, it does have the marvelous ability to more or less melt away and become whatever developers make out of it, which is exactly why Apple made GarageBand and iMovie. That's the real difference between it and every other tablet thing out there: The iPad has the software to allow it to do and become these things, whether it's a guitar or a cookbook or a marvelous-looking magazine, and these other tablet things do not. Not yet.
As predicted, I don't think I'll ever use FaceTime on the iPad again after this week. It's never not awkward, one way or another.
from - http://gizmodo.com/#!5782982/ipad-2-review
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