iPad Event: My Thoughts, as it happened.

Now, we must remember that this is the first Apple event without Steve Jobs being with us, sure – the iPhone 4S announcement was taken by Tim Cook, but the next day Steve passed away – making this the first real event without him being here. But he’ll have been watching, somewhere, making sure everything goes as he would have wanted it to.

Of course, Tim Cook began with some updates before we got into the real meat of the keynote. First, he discussed the Apple retail stores and how they are growing in numbers now with new stores in Amsterdam and Grand Central. I have to say that these stores both look very nice, and Apple still remain the #1 location for a great shopping experience in my opinion.

Then we were of course fed the obligatory figures – 315 million iOS devices sold in 2011, 62 million in Q4. Now that is impressive. No other word to describe it really.

Then we got a real announcement – Apple TV has been updated, now supporting 1080p in addition to the iCloud updates I personally think that this is very nice and I will be buying the Apple TV this time, never owned one before and I was holding on for this event to buy one. Apple TV is still priced at $99 and the changes we saw today are available as a firmware update to the previous Apple TV.

Moving on then, to iPad!

Once again, we were given a few statistics: 15.4 Million iPads sold in the final quarter of 2011.  That’s more than HP shipped PC’s in the same quarter – if anything can signify to you that we are virtually in a post-PC world now, this statistic will be it.

There is now a choice of over 200,000 apps made specifically for the iPad and of course Apple used that to poke fun at their rivals Samsung. A few apps were shown as ‘blown up’ smartphone apps; personally, I think this is a bit harsh. Yeah, the Android market doesn’t offer such a wide range of specific tablet applications but there is a good enough selection and also, lets not forget that the iPad also runs blown up smartphone apps... (By the way, I have neither an iPad or an Android tablet of any kind, so please don’t call me a fanboy etc.)

Finally then, the “New iPad” is revealed and it has a home button. Thank god! Personally, I find that the home button is almost a kind of Apple symbol on their devices and to remove it at this stage would not be the right thing to do in my opinion.

The first feature we were shown was, of course, the famously dubbed Retina display that offers over a million more pixels than a traditional 1080p display with an amazing resolution of 2048x1536 – exactly as expected. Furthermore, it also offers 44% improved saturation.

Then the A5X processor was shown off, rather sneakily by Tim Cook, who said that it has “Quad-core graphics” which led everyone to think that we now have a quad core tablet, but no, the A5X is dual-core only, with improved quad-core graphics to drive all those pixels in the shiny new retina display – 3.1 million, in total.

Next, the iSight camera was discussed. The rear facing camera now boasts 5 megapixels in addition to auto-exposure, auto-focus and image stabilization which will work brilliantly with the 1080p video recording that is now offered. Sadly, however, the front-facing FaceTime camera stays at the dull VGA resolution. To me, this is a massive disappointment, to improve the rear facing camera so much and do nothing to the front-facing one is, to me, a bit of a disappointment to be honest, but it is what it is and we just have to live with it.

Next up, we were shown voice dictation – not Siri, voice dictation. A rather brief mention of that, probably to gloss over the lack of Siri. Again, slight disappointment, I would have loved to see Siri, but I will just accept it regardless.

Then, boom! 4G LTE is announced! This is a huge feature. Well, at least it is for anyone who lives in an area offering 4G LTE, myself however, living in the UK cannot expect to get these lightning speeds until 2013/14. Despite this, I have seen the speed of 4G and it blows me away and I cannot wait for it to make its way across the pond. We were then shown a speed comparison between iPad 2 and the new iPad, very impressive, I have to say!

After a quick rundown on the new features we are told that we can expect 10 hours of battery life, 9 hours on 4G. Staying the same as the iPad 2. That, that is seriously impressive.

After a quick talk on prices, which remain that same from the previous version and then we got a few traditional demos of newly developed apps for the shiny new iPad including updates for iWork, iMovie and GarageBand and a new announcement of iPhoto for iPad which is priced at $4.99 or £2.99.

Apart from that we didn’t see much else in this event, no “one more thing” which was a disappointment to many but, maybe it was a Steve Jobs thing.

All in all, this was a good event, and I think that Tim Cook, Phil Schiller and everyone else who took to the stage handled it very well – although there were a few let downs, the new iPad is definitely the best iteration of the device so far and one that leaves me wishing I had more money in the bank!