Thursday, March 3, 2011

Apple : Original iPad prices slashed, yours for just £329

Apple : Original iPad prices slashed, yours for just £329

Original iPad prices slashed, yours for just £329

Posted: 03 Mar 2011 03:24 AM PST

Now that it's all about the slim and delicious iPad 2, the original iPad has received a hefty price cut in order to clear stock.

Like the beloved house pet mercilessly cast aside after the birth of a new baby, Apple is in the process of batting the original iPad out of the way to make way for the incoming iPad 2, before it finally gets the message and slinks off to Pet Rescue for good.

Here in the UK, Apple has reduced the 16GB iPad with Wi-Fi to the bargain price of £329 when bought directly from the technology giants – that's the best part of £100 cheaper than it was yesterday.

Update: Save yourself a further £40 by snapping up a refurbished iPad for £289. £289!

Cheap as chips - gold-plated chips, that is

You can also pick up the 32GB and 64GB models for a song, at £399 and £479 respectively.

On the 3G side of things, the prices range from £429 for the 16GB model to £579 for the 64GB behemoth, but of course you're also looking at an additional data plan for the 3G service, too.

If you're hoping to snap up an iPad bargain, you'd be wise to get a wriggle on as there's no guarantee that Apple will replenish stock once the iPad 2 comes out on 25 March.

Opinion: How iPad 2 smacks down the competition

Posted: 03 Mar 2011 01:44 AM PST

On 2 March 2011, Steve Jobs appeared on stage and proceeded to give Apple's competition in the tablet market a bit of a kicking. (One might also argue he smacked the PC market a few times: in referring to the iPad as a 'post-PC' device, it's pretty clear Apple thinks traditional computers aren't long for this world.)

As we outlined, Apple's new iPad ticks all of the non-bonkers spec boxes that people were expecting and, broadly speaking, brings the iPad back to the cutting-edge of touchscreen tablets, obliterating any major tech lead the competition thought it had.

Some of the more extreme rumours of course turned out to be hogwash. The device has no extra ports (such as USB or an SD-card slot), and there's no Retina display (although with the iPad 2's surprisingly rapid international rollout, the suggestion of an iPad 3 release date later in 2011 no longer looks so unlikely); however, when Steve Jobs argued that the tablet had received a "complete redesign", he wasn't kidding.

Slimmer, flatter

On the outside, the device is now a little more svelte, having lost a third of its thickness and a tiny amount of weight. Its back is flat, it comes in black or white, and the revised device boasts a front and back camera.

The more technically inclined will be excited to hear that the iPad's innards now boast an A5 processor and hugely improved graphics performance; the doubling of CPU speed and massive boost to graphics (Apple claims up to "nine times faster") is Apple's latest shot across the bows of the videogames and creative industries.

Apple isn't pitching the iPad 2 as a device to mess about with now and again, but as a fully fledged computing platform that, for many people, now has more than enough grunt to take over from a laptop.

And despite the iPad 2 being a lot thinner than its predecessor (and thinner than an iPhone 4), it retains the original's excellent battery life: up to ten hours, with a month or so of standby time.

Not about specs

Ultimately, though, Apple's event once again highlighted that 'fisticuffs at dawn' over spec lists rapidly becomes utterly pointless when most people only care about what you can do with a device, not what's under the hood.

For example, instead of boasting about the cameras in the iPad 2, Apple concentrated on demoing FaceTime and Photo Booth. The company then showcased practical applications of footage taken by the new rear camera by revealing the revised iMovie - an update to the $4.99/£2.99 app.

iMovie is now universal and on the iPad has an interface resembling the desktop release. And as if to drive the point home regarding what Apple really cares about (clue: it's not gigahertz and gigabytes - it's enabling creativity), GarageBand for iPad was unleashed, boasting an interface in many ways superior to that of the Mac version.

The point is that technology and specs are all fine, but they only really mean something if you can employ them. It's no good having a quad-core tablet with 8GB of RAM if the only software available is a slightly knackered version of Solitaire.

Apple utterly gets this, and, frankly, anyone still claiming the iPad is about consumption rather than creativity after watching Apple's iPad 2 event needs to be smacked round the head with one.

Luckily for them, that'll hurt slightly less with the lighter iPad 2. It's a win for everyone.
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