We thought we’d revisit last month’s article about the new iPad (aka the iPad 3) and give our impressions after nearly 30 days of ownership. Is it worth the $500 (at least) to upgrade? How did the upgrade experience go? What about that battery life and heat?
Coming from an iPad 1, the new iPad is much faster. That speed was my primary motivating factor to part with $500 hard-earned dollars for the basic wifi model. As a fairly heavy iPad user, I had grown weary of type-ahead delays where the keyboard doesn’t respond to keystrokes for several seconds. I wanted web pages to respond faster and typing to be delay free. I wanted youtube videos to load without stopping every 15 seconds. And, I wanted to be able to read my electronic magazine subscriptions and books without having to zoom the text so much.
The new iPad 3 delivers, albeit at the expense of battery life. I was always amazed at the first-generation iPad’s battery life – this one isn’t so great. You’ll want to take your power cord with you on that next long road trip or flight, because you won’t get an entire day of use out of it like you did with the iPad 1. This is, however, an acceptable compromise in the author’s opinion.
What about the backup and restore of my files from the iPad 1? This was seamless, and the cloud faithfully restored all of my files and programs from my iPad 1 to the new iPad wirelessly. I did have some issues getting the wireless iTunes sync to work, which the technicians at SpireTech were quick to fix – it turned out to be a firewall setting that the iTunes software didn’t set properly.
I haven’t experienced the mysterious heat issue that has been purported to be a problem. All in all, a good upgrade – and we’ll give it a thumbs-up, particularly if you don’t have an iPad or if you are coming from a first generation iPad. However, if you already have an iPad 2, I’d recommend waiting on that upgrade.