Hi all, I am here to try and help you make a decision on whether or not you should purchase a Apple I-Pad 2 or not. I just recently purchased an iPad and I did not know what I was getting into. First off, there is a very big misconception by a lot of people, that you have to purchase this from an Apple store. Well, I am here to tell you that, you do not have to get this directly from them you can purchase this item from a lot of different stores, which include Meijer’s, Best Buy, ABT, and other such electronic stores like even Hhgregg. I paid $500, but that was for only the pad itself. If you want any other accessories it will cost you a little bit more. This I-Pad is pretty cool for the most part, it just takes a little getting used to and the fingertip control is the greatest invention that I have ever seen.

You can either choose from a black or white type, we chose black just because it looked so cool. They do sell 10 different colored covers that will cost you about $40 each. These colors include: pink, green, light blue, black, dark blue, navy blue, red, tan, white, and grey. Each of these covers are magnetic so that it will protect the screen while it is in transport. A couple of other important points that you should know is that there are only two carriers that will let you have access with and they are AT&T and Verizon. So, if you are not a member of either carriers you will have to pay an extra activation fee and sign a contract with them.

Highlighted Features
Because there is so much to this iPad I will only touch on the major features and go into the other ones as I discover the new world that I am embarking on. Of memory size. Of course, each of these will cost you a little more. They start at $499.00 for the 16 Gb, $599.00 for the 32 Gb, and $699 for the 64 Gb. This does not include Wi-Fi, if you want Wi-Fi access then you will pay and additional price of $100.00 per unit to have Wi-fi acess any time. For instance the 16 Gb with Wi-fi will cost you $599.00, the 32 Gb with Wi-Fi will cost you $699.00, and the 64 GB with Wi-Fi will cost you $799.00. All of this and you will still have to pay a monthly fee for their service.

These iPads come in different kinds, and these include a 16, 32, and 64 GB These iPad come in two colors that I know of and they are white and black and have a 9.7” display screen (measuring diagonally) led-backlit glossy widescreen multi-touch screen with IPS technology. The pixel resolution is 1024-x-768 pixels @ 132 pixels per square inch. Fingerprints, who ever worried about fingerprints, with this product it has a fingerprint resistant (oleophobic) coating. You also get a 1-Ghz dual-core Apple A5 custom-designed, high-performance, low-power system-on-a-chip.

Unlike other tablets, this one has two cameras one is located In the front and one on the back. The back camera has the ability to do HD (720p) video recording and up to 30 frames per second with audio, with a 5x digital zoom camera. The front camera also has video recording capabilities and also up to 30 frames per second with audio and the VGA quality from a still camera. You will also have the ability, with a simple tap of your finger to control your video and still shots. You can also do photo and photo tagging via Wi-Fi.

The battery is built in and is a 25 watt per hour rechargeable lithium-polymer battery. When new you can get up to 10 hours of usage whether you are surfing the net or just watching or listening to music. This comes with a charging cord and an adapter to be able to charge via the PC. This iPad has an input/output connector that has a 30 pin dock connector, and a 3.5 mm stereo headphone mini-jack.

Along with all of these features you will also have the ability to use the sleep/wake option, there is also an on/off switch, if you do not like this to rotate then there is an option to be able to lock this out. You can get this with or without Wi-Fi and 3G connection from Verizon or AT&T, this also has Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR technology. You do not have to carry speakers around with you because this has a built-in speaker and microphone. If you do purchase the wi-fi model you will receive a micro-SIM card. This is kind of hid and sits flush with the bottom of the iPad, and you will need a paper clip to remove the little drawer to be able to insert the micro-sim card inside. This has three sensors that will help in the operations and they are a three axis gyro, accelerometer, and an ambient light sensor.

When trying to decide whether or not you want to purchase the cheaper model or not, think about this, if you purchase your iPad with wi-fi in the beginning you will not have to purchase another gadget latter on to get that capability. You will also have the assistance of GPS navigation and a mini-compass.

The audio on this, is about as good as it can get without the assist of an outside or external speaker. When you put the volume on this as high as it can go it still will not get distorted and crackly like some speakers do when you turn them up to loud. The frequency of the built-in audio speaker is 20Hz-20,000Hz. The audio format is supported by HE-AAC (V1 and V2) and AAC (8 to 20 Kbps), protected by AAC (which is from the itunes store), MP3 (8 to 20 Kbps), MP3 VBR, audible formats 2, 3, and 4 enhanced audio, AAX), plus apple lossless, AIFF, and WAV. This iPad can only go so loud by itself, but it does have a Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound that is liked to the apple digital audio. If you do what I did and that is purchase a product called apple TV you can also air stream with this iPad. As far as I know this is the only device that can do this. It will allow you to do video and audio mirroring with a compatible adapter. The format is 1080P with these devices. Your video out is at 576p and with an apple component it is 480p by using a AV cable made by apple. The video formats are supported by H.264 video up to 1080p and a 30fps, high profiles at 4.1 with an ACC-LC audio up to 160Kbps.

Pictures and Languages
If you are wondering about the pictures that you will see, they have an excellent image configuration, these can be viewed in jpg, tiff, gif, doc, docx, htm, html, key, and you will be able to use adobe acrobat and Microsoft word, Microsoft power point, and Microsoft excel. You can even program, keyboard, and dictionary support in your iPad in one of the 35 different languages: English, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Arabic, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese.

To access all of these features this iPad has given you and easy to use voice over screen reader to help with keeping the glare down while you are surfing the internet. This also has the neatest support for playback of closed caption scenes that you may want to access. You will be able to have a very light touch when it comes to assisting you with all of your accessories and adapters. The full screen and zoom magnification that this product has is the greatest. With a touch of two fingers you can do a pinch motion and zoom in and out on any of your documents or pictures that you may have installed on your iPad. No matter how bad your eye sight may be this has just the right font size for you. This also has a very easy to control left to right volume adjustment. But remember this will only go up so high because of the small speakers. If you want it any louder you will need some external speakers to assist with that problem.

System Requirements
There are some things you must have in order to use this iPad, and that is an Apple ID, and internet access which you should be able to hot spot off somewhere for free. But if you want to access the internet all the time you will need to subscribe to their service for a fee. In order to sync this with iTunes on your pc or your mac you will need: [MAC:OS X v10.5.8 or later], for a PC, you will need windows 7, windows vista, or windows XP home edition or the professional with a service pack 3 or later. Usually when you purchase a new laptop or a PC you will have this already on your new product at least that is what we got when we purchased our Dell. You will also need an account with iTunes 10.5 or later for this to work properly. They might not be to forthcoming with this info, but you do not have to pay for a iTunes account only when you download any songs will there be a fee. When you open the box there is not much inside just the iPad and usb cable to connect to your PC and a 10w USB power adapter for charging and very little info in the way of a manual. If you want the manual you will have to go to the Apple website and down load it. But, I have to warn you that the manual is about 140 pages. This is why they do not just throw it inside of the package.

Experience So far
So far we have not had any real problems other than this product is new to us. It is just simply amazing what you can do with this product and the ease that you can do it. The first that you need to do is to turn your unit on and this has a small button located on the upper hand corner of the iPad and you will need to hold this for a second or so to get the iPad to be energized and light up. Once you energize this tablet, and start to use it you will see a lot of very vibrant colored icons. While you have this on the only problem that I have is that if you do not touch the screen for a little while it will automatically lock. This is only a problem for a little while until you go into the settings and fix this to not do that. All you have to do is set a pass-code and then select the off option. I have since found out that they sell a cover that will automatically un-lock your iPad as soon as you open the cover.

This is called an iPad smart cover, when you use this of course it will not work unless you go into the settings and basically tell the iPad that you have a smart cover, and then hit the on/off selection and you will be able to enjoy this iPad a lot more. I love the easy access to the volume controls, they are located on the upper right-hand side of the iPad. Just above the volume you will have a slide switch, I thought at first that this was stupid until you start hear those annoying alerts beeps and tones. This slide switch will also allow you to make the sounds of the alerts stop (mute them) and you can also stop the screen from rotating unexpectedly.

It was not to soon, before I was tooling around the internet with all of the apps that this has. This iPad has 13 status icons and 20 app icons. The status icons usually visual all the time and they are as follows: an “airplane” (which will not allow you to access the internet while in flight as to not to interfere with all of the planes electronics), a “3G” status sign which tells your signal speed, E for edge network from your carrier, a “O” GRFS tells you what your carrier has, next you will see the “wi-fi signal” which looks like the three lines that are you speaker volume button on your keyboard.

Conclusion
You will enjoy the picture clarity that this Ipad has and the ease of navigation that this has. The fact that this is so light weight and compact makes it very east to transport. If you are a person on the go this is the tablet for you. Just remember one thing and that is that you will need to download all of the apps that you need to be able to use this. You will not be able to use this like a laptop. Those come already loaded, this pad does not. Other than that you will love the options that this has to offer.

Recommended: Yes