Christmas iPad Rumour
I’ve just heard a rumour about the Apple iPad that hasn’t been heard anywhere else on the web before!
Apple iPad
No, it’s not that it will have a forward facing camera making it FaceTime compatible, that’s almost guaranteed. It’s not that it will have the Retina display or even that it will have a dual core processor, more RAM and be crafted from carbon fibre. It’s not that there might be a 7″ version or even that it’ll be available in…. Wait for it… White.
Nope, the rumour is that I might be getting one for Christmas!
I could of course wait until after Christmas and the rumoured iPad 2. Some of the rumoured things would be nice, more RAM would make the multi-tasking of iOS4.2 slicker, the Retina display would be beautiful I’m sure. I’m not too bothered by the FaceTime capabilities though as I’m sure people barely want to hear from me let alone see me at the same time.
I’m not expecting the iPad to revolutionise my life either. In fact it won’t really do anything that I can’t do already. It will just mean that I can do some of them from the living room rather than the office and that I’ll have a mobile device that can tap into the whole ‘app’ ecosystem.
If there was a rumour that the iPad 2 was going to have a SD card slot that would make the memory expandable then that would be good and a USB port would be excellent, if only to allow me to connect my Garmin Forerunner to it so that I could upload activities to my exercise tracking software. I haven’t heard any rumours along these lines though so at the moment there’s no need to wait.
So, what will I use it for? Well, most of the time I’d imagine it will sit in the living room acting as a large digital photo frame scrolling through all of our family photos. It will also act as a mobile web browser, calendar and e-mail machine. No doubt we’ll get lots of apps for it and Morgan will play games on it. We may even end up getting an Apple TV so that (in conjunction with the AirPlay technology) we’ll be able to use the iPad as a remote to stream digital content to our TV.
Also, I don’t currently have a laptop or a smart phone so the iPad will sit somewhere in between both of these devices. I don’t have a laptop because I have a desktop computer (which I find more robust) and I rarely need the portability of a laptop. I don’t have a smart phone because I can’t afford the monthly contract charges and have managed so far without one.
There are times however when having a portable digital device would be nice . Note I said nice rather than essential, or even useful. Sometimes when visiting clients it would be nice to have a device that I could show them certain things on. Although they usually have a computer of their own that I can use. Other times it would be nice to have a device to use for entertainment purposes such as reading books, playing games or watching films.
I’m sure it will come out-and-about with us too. We’ll be able to use it for activities such as geocaching, maybe not ‘live’ as we won’t have the 3G version, but we’ll be able to store information about caches on it and use it to get us close to the action. There are also lots of nice mapping apps and apps with identification guides for birds, fungi, trees, stargazing and such like.
No doubt we’ll be able to use it in the kitchen too as this seems to be a very common use case. There are plenty of recipe apps out there because of this.
Whatever we use it for, it’ll be a cool gadget to have. It won’t change our lives, it won’t even allow us to do things we can’t already do but I’m looking forward to Xmas day already!
2 Responses
Leave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Two words: Angry Birds. That is all.
So I’ve heard – Although it’s a pretty expensive toy just for Angry Birds – I’ll need something else to justify it as well.
Al.