The SBP Archives - Your less than frequent dose of SBP!

I had a chance to play around with the original iPad and I must admit, it's a pretty neat device. The monitor is dazzling, the touchscreen is a pleasure to use and the apps that take advantage of the full screen that I tried out were terrific (Geometry Wars...awesome!).

So with the iPad 2, they added a lot of new features that, for anyone who was waiting to get one, really have no reason to wait now. Dual-core chips. 33% thinner, 15% lighter, built in two-way camera...lots of neat gadgets for the end user. So what's my beef?

The base price of $499 doesn't seem crazy, until you learn it has a lousy 16GB hard drive. 16 gigs...that's it! A base netbook usually has a standard ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY gig hard drive for 1/2 the price. For an extra $100 you can get a 32GB model, and then for $699, you can get a 64GB iPad 2. So the Apple people are trying to tell you an extra 16GB of space costs $100 or 48GB costs $200. Yeah, sure it does. I bought my sister a ONE THOUSAND GB back-up hard drive for a hundred bucks. And of course, there's no memory card slots on the iPad 2 so you can't just add your own memory at a more reasonable price, you're pretty much stuck paying what Apple wants. But most people WILL pay, so who cares, right?

Another thing that drives me nuts is that Apple still won't support Flash on their web browser. F****** Flash has been around as long as Rogers has provided lousy internet service, and there's nothing more annoying than using an Apple product and going to pretty much 90% of the web pages out there that have it, and you can use just 1/2 the web page because Apple wants you to watch video only through iTunes (maybe, i really don't know their logic behind it). It might cost them a few ivory backscratchers so perhaps that's why, but really, there's no excuse for it.

There's already a backorder on the new iPad 2's so people seem to overlook these problems and will pick one up anyway. That's okay, you vote with your dollars when it comes to these things, and if that's what the public wants, so be it. But not me, I'll pass and stick with my...iPod touch.

Woof!