So I've had the new iPad for a little over two weeks now (bought it the Friday it came out, March 16th, stood in line at the Bethesda Row Apple Store for about 40 minutes which honestly wasn't bad) and I think I'm ready to actually talk about it instead of just gushing on Twitter.
The Retina display is the whole story here, and I know everyone's already said that, but I didn't really get it until I put my iPad 2 next to it. Text just sits differently on the screen. It's not "sharper," its more like the pixels stop being a thing your brain has to filter out. I was reading a PDF of a contract for a freelance gig last week and caught myself not squinting for the first time in months. Apple said they sold 3 million of these in the first three days, which sounds made up until you remember how big the line at my mall was for a Friday morning tablet release.
Battery life is basically the same as the iPad 2, maybe a hair worse in my experience, though I haven't been scientific about it. The thing runs warmer than the 2 did too, especially playing anything graphics-heavy, which brings me to my actual complaint: the fan noise. Wait, no, it doesn't have a fan, that's the point, it's just... warm. Noticeably warm on the lower left corner when you're charging and using it at the same time. Not dangerous-warm. Just warm enough that I mentioned it to my brother and he thought I was messing with him.
I will say the camera bump from the iPad 2 (which was basically a joke, a 0.7 megapixel joke) to a 5 megapixel iSight camera is nice but I still feel a little ridiculous holding up a 9.7 inch slab to take a photo. Saw a guy doing it at my kid's soccer game on Saturday and had to physically stop myself from saying something. If you own a phone, use the phone. Thats not really an iPad problem though, thats a people problem.
Been playing a lot of Angry Birds Space too, which apparently crossed 10 million downloads across platforms sometime around the 26th, which tracks because it feels like half the internet has been posting screenshots of some zero-gravity level for the last week and a half. Its a good game! The physics gimmick with the little planets actually works instead of feeling tacked on, which is more than I can say for most sequel-izations of a hit mobile game. My daughter is better at it than I am, which I've decided not to think about too hard.
Yesterday being April 1st, my inbox and RSS reader were an absolute minefield of fake product announcements, as usual. Google did their thing with an 8-bit NES version of Google Maps that was honestly more charming than most of the "jokes" tech companies put out on April Fools, half of which are just thinly veiled real feature teasers anyway. I fell for exactly zero of them this year, which either means I'm getting better at this or I've just become too cynical to be delighted by anything on the internet anymore. Probably the second one.
Anyway, back to the iPad. If you've got a first-generation iPad, this is an easy upgrade, don't even think about it twice. If you've got the iPad 2 like I did, its a harder call, the screen is genuinely the reason to do it and everything else (LTE if your carrier supports it, the camera, slightly faster processor) is gravy. I don't regret it, but I also spent the first three days just opening apps to watch fonts render, which is a slightly embarrassing thing to admit in writing.
One last thing: the Smart Cover still doesn't cover the back, and at this price point that still bugs me a little. Small complaint, I know. But I've scratched two iPads now on the same stupid kitchen counter and you'd think by the third generation they'd have figured out a case that actually protects the thing.