Seriously Considering Purchasing the New iPad

[jbjints]

Hello:
I am the new guy in town and I have never before owned an iPad. I am seriously considering purchasing the new iPad but I was hoping I could ask a few questions.

What do you like most about the iPad?

I am also torn between purchasing the 16gb or the 32gb. I am not sure if I will be watching a ton of movies on the iPad but if I was too can I delete the movie from the device and it would be saved on iTunes for future use right?

Do video games take up a ton of space because I am sure to buy at least a few games.

Overall, are you happy with the iPad 3rd Gen?

Do you recommend I purchase the new iPad over the iPad2? I don't think it makes sense to go back technology wise right?

Thanks,

Joe

[jbjints]

Is there anyway to use an external hard drive?

[kornchild2002]

1. I am happy with my iPad 3 (or the "new iPad" as Apple calls it). The display is definitely the best aspect about it.

2. You cannot delete videos directly off the iPad using the iPad itself. However, if you have a movie in your iTunes library, you can tell iTunes to delete it off of your iPad and it will remain in your iTunes library. You don't have to sync everything in your iTunes library to your iPad.

3. It depends. Some games, like the Angry Birds series, take up about 45-65MB. Others consume even less while there are titles that take up over 200MB. Grand Theft Auto III is almost 500MB in size. Also don't forget that other apps such as Keynote and Pages will take up around 400MB as well. All-in-all, you should buy the most that you can afford. I don't recommend getting the 16GB iPad especially since apps are starting to take up more space due to using a higher resolution for the iPad 3. Also don't forget that you don't actually have access to the full 16GB. In fact, it is more like 14GB by the time you factor everything in.

4. I recommend buying the iPad 3. Right now, I don't see a purpose in buying the iPad 2 unless you are picking it up for a teenager. You might as well get the most recent technology as the iPad 3's display really is worth it. Apps that take advantage of it look much better, text is smoother and easier to read (I don't have to constantly zoom in and out of websites just to read something), colors look better, HD videos really pop, etc.

5. You can't directly hook up an external hard drive to an iPad and have it work. iOS doesn't work that way even if it was physically possible (which it is). iOS will use the iPad's internal storage ONLY for accessing apps, music, movies, etc. There are solutions from Seagate and a few other companies. The hard drive from Seagate actually connects to the iPad via wi-fi and you access everything using Seagate's app (you can't directly access content on the drive using iOS). It only comes in 500GB and is expensive ($200 I think) but it is your best on-the-go option for accessing large porting of content.

[tazz3]

Right now iam saveing up my money to buy the new ipad 32 gig verison. I was going to get the 16 gig but its two small i rather be safe then sorry. but i saw the new ipad next to the ipad 2 to me the screen looked the same i spent a half hour or so with the 2 of them. i still like the ipad 2 though i can get the 32 gig cheap from best buy

[kornchild2002]

You didn't look hard enough if the displays for the iPad 3 and iPad 2 appeared to be the same...

[decafjava]

Originally Posted by kornchild2002

You didn't look hard enough if the displays for the iPad 3 and iPad 2 appeared to be the same...

My sister had an ipad1, brother-in-law an ipad2 and a friend recently got a 3. Trust me the newest one's noticably better.

[c.hack]

Originally Posted by kornchild2002

You didn't look hard enough if the displays for the iPad 3 and iPad 2 appeared to be the same...

Even if you don't notice the resolution and don't care about the camera and don't care about the big GPU upgrade, the new iPad doubles the RAM to 1 GB. It makes task swapping so much faster!

The 4 improvements are easily worth $100.

I got the new iPad and have absolutely no regrets. It has replaced my laptop, desktop and POS android tablet for 90% of computer time.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[newiphone4guy]

If you have alot of richtext files (.rtf) that you'd like to be able to edit on the ipad, you will find that it is not possible, because IOS does-not support richtext files.
I find this extremely annoying given that .rtf is the default for mac. As a results, I have hundreds of .rtf files, that I cannot edit on my ipad.
You can use icloud/dropbox-based apps such as "cloudon" which is ok as long as you have internet access
whenever you need to edit your files. But there is no way I have found that you can actually have the files residing-on the ipad be editable unfortunately.

[kornchild2002]

1. iOS doesn't natively support a bunch of formats, so what?

2. You can have rtf files reside on the iPad for viewing and editing, you just need the right app to do so. There are a bunch of office productivity apps that allow this.

3. Nobody on here was talking about rtf files.

[Code Monkey]

Originally Posted by kornchild2002

3. It depends. Some games, like the Angry Birds series, take up about 45-65MB. Others consume even less while there are titles that take up over 200MB. Grand Theft Auto III is almost 500MB in size. Also don't forget that other apps such as Keynote and Pages will take up around 400MB as well. All-in-all, you should buy the most that you can afford. I don't recommend getting the 16GB iPad especially since apps are starting to take up more space due to using a higher resolution for the iPad 3.

It's even potentially worse than that. Many games, even before iPad 3 resolution assets existed, were topping the 1GB size - e.g. I have something around 150 apps on my device but over a third of the size occupied by apps is accounted for by just ten of them (over 7GB for the ten biggest apps on my device). I wouldn't buy any iOS device with less than 32GB if there's going to be gaming and other media used simultaneously.

As an aside, one of the things Apple is going to have to address in the near future is selective installers that will only put the assets you need for your device and discard the rest. Lots of wasted megabytes in carrying assets for non-retina "iPhone", retina "iPhone", standard iPad, and retina iPad when your device is only going to use one of them.

On the other hand, I cannot get behind Apple's pricing for 64GB of storage, just can't bring myself to pay them that sort of extortion when I can manage with 32GB no matter how much I know I could take advantage of it .

[kornchild2002]

That was probably my biggest disappointment with the iPad 3. Had Apple made 32GB the smallest, 64GB the middle, and 128GB the max, I could understand the highest price level. That was also an issue I had back in the day when I picked up my iPad 1 and iPad 2. I didn't like spending that much for 64GB of storage but I didn't get a 3G capable model so I had to pack all of my media on there for trips. Now I have access to Hulu and Netflix everywhere and neither of those actually consume that much bandwidth (I still haven't used all of my 2GB of data and I have only a few days left before my month runs out).

I would have gladly paid $800 and some odd on a 128GB 4G LTE iPad 3 but Apple wants that much for the 64GB version. Granted, I am surprisingly doing just fine with 32GB but having the extra space is always nice. That haves many people wondering if Apple is holding off on introducing a 128GB iDevice until the iPhone 5. For whatever reason, that line seems to get stiffed the most when it comes to capacity as Apple didn't let it hit 64GB until the iPhone 4S (last year!) despite the iPhone being Apple's number one product and seller.

That is why I hope Apple introduces a 128GB iPhone 5 this year simply because I want to carry nothing more than my iPad and iPhone. I am getting kind of tired of carrying my iPad, iPod, Droid X, and digital camera around. The added capacity on the iPhone 5 would not only make it nice for music playback but also for photo taking since I am constantly filling the 8GB SDHC card that came with my digital camera (and the iPhone 4S's camera is already more than nice enough for what I usually take photos of).

[Flyboybob]

My wife has an iPad 2 and I just purchased the new iPad for myself. I went for the 32 gig version only because I got the WiFi only version and wanted to be able to carry as much media as I wanted for trips. I can get WiFi at work, at home, in hotels and in many public places. The retina display is wonderful. An iPhone application viewed at 2X the resolution is very clear while on my wife's iPad it's not too good.