I seem to be the only one here for whom the retinal display
is the deciding factor. I could never have owned the original iPad or iPad2, but I can see myself getting daily use out of the one formerly known as 3.
I try to be an empiricist rather than a brand loyalist (though I don't always succeed). A few years ago, when I borrowed a friend's iPad1(TM) a month after launch, I learned that my actually owning it would have been an exercise in shrieking and throwing silverware at people.
First, there was the whooshing and flashing and special sparkle or wiggle that met my every gesture while first using Pages. Attempting to move an open quote mark to the beginning of a different word, I felt as if I were initiating an attack by a wizard in an RPG, and were forced to endure sound effects, thunderbolts and heroic music when all I wanted was for an enemy team to lose health points. Even most games allow you to shut off the animation as an option. Pages didn't and it's supposed to be a glorified word processing program.
Second, the touchscreen felt far less exact than a physical keyboard. For grocery lists and address book functions, the touchscreen was fine. But for the mechanical text entry of a novel, few gestures or pop-ups were humble enough to be exact or reliable enough to be seamless. It was clear I'd have to buy the external keyboard to get any use out of the fragile beast.
Third, and the worst problem for me, was screen resolution. Something about that native resolution, the IPS screen itself (however pretty it looked from different angles) and the focus on special gesturing made my eyes feel fatigued after just a little reading. I stare at unedited books and copy almost eight hours a day, so I have to be careful about that.
I had a much less fatiguing experience with the iPhone 4's retinal screen if not the phone itself.
But that was before the iPad non-3.
The newest iterations, both of the iPad and Pages, address many of my original complaints. In fact, I might easily have made plans to buy an iPad (just as the world seemed to discover Android tablets) if not for two things:
- Lion's adoption of iOS as a model, leaving many professionals without a nuanced UI and making file tweaks less useful for professional musicians and editors. I'd counted on geeks writing tech apps and plugins for the iPad, not the Mac OS's embracing of iOS in all its inflexible simplicity.
- Apple's entry into the book market, which created perhaps the worst form of DRM so far. Even a certain sorcerer's apprentice seems to be stuck. I'm all for the flexibility of reading pdfs on an iPad and not an eInk device. But the tablet I choose for that purpose should not be tempting me constantly to buy books I can't back up or read on other devices.