The Apple iPad 2 is official - And it is a World-Beater

Apple iPad 2. The Apple iPad 2 is official, and it is impressive. Where do we start. In my case it would be the size and weight. The new iPad 2 measures in at 241.2 x 185.7 x 8.8 mm and weighs in at 601 grams. That is an impressive 0.34 inches in thickness and a lighter 1.33 pounds. This makes is 33% thinner and more than 10% lighter than the original iPad. The -.34 inch thickness actually makes it thinner than the iPhone.

As expected, the iPad 2 has a more powerful processor, a 1GHz dual core ARM-Cortex A9 based system called the A5. No word on the amount of RAM, but it will be at least 512MB. A three axis gyroscope, like that found on the iPhone 4, has been added and the iPad 2 has front and rear cameras. 

The screen is still the old 9.7-inch 1024 x 768 display. While people seem to want higher and higher resolutions, there is really nothing wrong with the old display. Oh, yes... you get the choice of black or white front bezels.

The new iPad 2, like the original iPad, will come with 3G and WiFi only models, and has storage options of 16GB, 32GB and 64GB. It will be selling at the same price points as the old model. And this will really kill its competition.

A new Smart cover has been design to keep the entire package thinner and lighter.

The Apple iPad 2 will be available in the US by March 11, and in 26 more countries by March 26. No word on a Philippine launch date. Given that the original iPad was only officially launched on December 17, 2011, which is less than three months ago, I suspect a long wait.

Lower prices on the original iPad. The original iPad is now available at Php19,900 for the  WiFi only 16GB model and Php23,990 for the WiFi + 3G with 16GB of storage. The other models have similar price reductions. The new Php19,900 entry level price makes the original iPad a world-beater too we think.

Day 10 with the HTC Desire HD: Handheld Browsing and more on Battery Life

Handheld browsing. I never really got into browsing WAP sites. It never appealed to me. My Sony Ericsson P990i was a very decent phone for web browsing, but my first carrier supplied unit displayed would have an "XML parsing error" and numerous websites. The replacement Sony Ericsson P990i displayed the same problem. The second replacement was thankfully a Nokia E61i, which had an excellent, for its time, web browser. The Nokia Mini-Map browser. After a month of using it to browse the web. While it 2.6-inch screen was large by the standards back than, I found it too small, and found navigating the web with a D-Pad uncomfortable.

With the HTC Desire HD and its 4.3-inch screen I can enjoyably surf the web for long periods of time, and not miss my laptop so much. The larger screen and the higher 800 x 480 resolution help a lot. But even more is the ease of navigating with a touchscreen interface combined with how the text on websites auto-fits into the boundaries of the screen leaving you only needing to scroll up or down. This auto-fit feature is not new. But it is just so seamless in the HTC Desire HD.

With the HTC Desire HD, I doubt I will be getting a tablet.

It seems like so long ago. A bit of nostalgia, and just to show how how far we come, I got this excerp from a post I wrote almost four years ago. 

The Nokia E61i was acquired to be used as a hand-held browser as much as for its other functions. No discussion of the phone would be complete without looking at its web browser and connectivity features. The E61i, like most N and all ESeries Nokia phones comes with the Safari based minimap browser.

In Nokia's own words this browser is designed to allows you to "Experience true Web" by bringing "desktop-like Web browsing experience to mobile devices." The Nokia Mini Map Browser render pages exactly the same way they would be rendered on a desktop or laptop computer. Rather than trying to get the whole page to fit within the narrow horizontal confines of the screen, Nokia gives you a more convenient way to navigate a web page which cannot fit on the screen. Since the Nokia Mini Map Browser displays that page in a the same way your desktop would, you will only see a small section of the page on the cellular phones screen. This means you have to do a quite a bit of vertical and horizontal scrolling to see navigate the page.

The Nokia Mini Map browser allows you to do this in an easier fashion. Press the Function Key + "8" key and a mini map of the entire page is displayed on your screen. A red box shows you where you are on that screen and from this mode you can scroll vertically and horizontally to the part of the page you want to see in greater detail. You can also zoom in or out of a page by pressing Function Key + "*" and Function Key + "#".

Battery life. In the local forums, I have read that battery life of the HTC Desire HD improves after several charge and discharge cycles. And I find that observation to be accurate. My initial use showed that the battery life would be about 24 hours with the data connection enabled. Now it is looking more like 24. Another thing I might suspect is after the initial "newness" or the device wears of, users might spend less time marveling at the screen. Given that the display accounts for a large fraction battery usage (right now mine is reading 75%) this factor might also account in the reported increases in battery life. 

Signing out for now.