Category: Apple

Apple Watch

The pre-orders for the Apple Watch opened on Friday morning and despite having some doubts after reading the many reviews that were published this week I’ve ordered an Apple Watch Sport in Space Grey.

s42sg-sbbk-sel

It’s over two years since I bought, tried and quickly sold a Pebble. For iOS users the Pebble was always a poorer platform compared to Android but I had issues with the size, looks and performance of the Pebble which have never really been improved although the Pebble Time does look to be a far better device. However the benefits and the opportunity that a permanent wearable device could bring still intrigues me hence the Apple Watch order. Health tracking in particular interests me and although the iPhone tracks steps just as well as my Fitbit, I don’t always have the phone with me unlike the Fitbit. However Fitbit’s refusal to share data with HealthKit is annoying and will ultimately force me elsewhere.

I’m aware that the Apple Watch could end up being a bit of a dud, especially the first generation. Size, performance and battery life all look like first generation compromises but this is the start of a brand new platform for Apple and the technologist in me is super interested in what that means for a user community that is so invested in smartphones. Will it lead to a shift to wearables? Is it the start of a new app store rush for watch app’s? Only time will tell and thats party why I’m sticking to the Sport edition for now as it’s the cheapest way of getting in on the platform.

Unfortunately I’ve not had chance to get into an Apple store to see the watch in the flesh as I’ve been hit with a nasty cold/flu bug this week which has kept me housebound but initial feedback from friends is that the Apple Watch is all the more impressive in the flesh and that the bands all have strengths and weaknesses that will mean personal choice more than one particular format will win out over time.

What is already tiring is seeing comments belittling people for pre-ordering an Apple Watch. Well they can all piss off as they are mostly the same folk that couldn’t believe the price of an iPhone when it first came out and they wouldn’t waste their money. Most of them now have an iPhone or a Samsung equivalent and very short memories. I’d rather try for myself and then make a judgment on it’s worth not just dismiss it offhand.

Spring Forward

Last nights Apple event was interesting for a number of reasons. Firstly they were finally detailing the Apple Watch and it’s been five years since Apple launched a new product category and it always fascinates me how Apple pitches and shapes their message. Secondly, so many people predicted that the keynote was all about the watch….wrong! Finally, no one predicted that Tim Cook would start with the Apple TV. Here are my quick thoughts on the products and message from last night.

Apple TV

  • No one expected Apple to lead with the Apple TV but the HBO Now announcement was a big deal. Exclusively launching on Apple TV for the first three months and in time for the new season of Game of Thrones this was what many users were wanting for years although $14.99 a month seems a bit high compared to Netflix.
  • Apple TV drops to £59. Thats it. No new hardware, no app store. I’m not the only one that was disappointed with that. Surely the hardware will see an update this year? Surely?

ResearchKit

  • Following on from puff pieces on CarPlay and HomeKit I wasn’t expecting much on health but ReasearchKit was afforded 15 minutes on the big stage and afterwards it was clear why.
  • This is a massive opportunity that started with the M7 processor in the iPhone 5S. Data is being captured and while it’s mostly seen as steps, it’s only going to get richer and help with medical research and diagnosis.
  • Apple Will Not See Your Data – clear message to customers and competitors on what differentiates Apple. Apple will need to be repeat this again and again along with the security message that they have been playing out recently.
  • Cynical view – we’re about to sell a $10000 watch so contrast it with a good news story but I don’t believe that to be the case.
  • Apple will open source ResearchKit so it can be run on any platform.
  • 5 apps already available and more on the way – this will be very interesting to watch over the coming years as the technology packed within phones and watches gets ever smarter.

MacBook

  • My favourite part of the whole event. The new designs shown throughout the new MacBook were impressive.
  • The new keyboard mechanism looked great although early feedback seems mixed.
  • The force touchpad shows so much invention…apart from it’s name.
  • 12 inch and Retina but so light and thin.
  • USB-C. One port. £69 adapter to get a data, video and power connector at the same time. If I look at my MacBook Air usage now though, that one port is enough.
  • CPU is a bit stingy looking but…Fanless! How will I tell when Flash is running? (clue – it’s not installed cause it’s a piece of shit)
  • All day battery is good but you are basically buying a battery with a screen and keyboard.
  • I’ll wait for reviews to see what playback looks like but assuming it’s OK, I’ll be buying a MacBook this year to replace the current Air and probably the iPad too. Next year, an iMac Retina to replace the five year old iMac. I do think the MacBook is the future of laptop design and the only other niggle is that this is rev 1.0 of the MacBook and the next version is probably the one to buy. But thats too much like common sense.

Apple Watch

  • Strange intro as Tim Cook recapped all the features.
  • Christy Turlington Burns was on stage to enthuse about the Apple Watch, running marathons and blogging about it at Apple.com. Felt totally false.
  • Kevin Lynch took to the stage to demo the Apple Watch in a real world scenario. Flawlessly done but pretty dull including the ubiquitous airport gate change demo.
  • 18 hour battery and the news that it’s replaceable still feels a 1.0 target being met. Like the heavy first iPad Retina which was updated after 6 months. I don’t think we’ll see a 2.0 watch that quickly but I do expect next years product to be much better.
  • It was then onto pricing which was pretty much in line with much of the speculation including the expensive Edition pricing.
  • Apple never really sold a compelling reason as to why I need an Apple Watch. I found this part of the event underwhelming and pretty disappointing compared to other product launches. Will I buy one? Probably not although there is a bit of me that feels I should have one to try. I bought and instantly sold a Pebble and if the Apple Watch had a GPS I’d find it a more compelling product. It’s a wait and see right now.

IMG_0333

Misc

  • Apple has mastered rolling out their products around the world quickly and efficiently. The same can’t be said for their services. Apple Pay, iTunes Radio, Beats, HBO Now and the initial batch of ResearchKit app’s are all US only. It’s only getting worse and becomes a bigger issue when the services are being used so heavily to promote the product. I hope they start to take this more seriously and while licensing is a complex issue, money helps and they have a lot of money so if anyone can fix it I expect it to be Apple.
  • Battery technology is becoming more of an anchor compared to the rest of the technology in our products. There’s clearly no Moore’s law for batteries.
  • Did anyone else expect more from Apple when it comes to their stores and promoting the Apple Watch than a new…table.

Overall a great keynote and one of the most interesting for years. The watch will sell millions but ResearchKit and the MacBook were the stars of the show. No one predicted that.

Mac Apps 2015

A recent post from Gordon on his current Mac App’s spurred me to look back at my last post on this in 2012. Has much changed?

Well Safari is now my browser of choice, iTunes still where my music is but podcasts are now in Instacast. A couple of smaller app’s have been eaten by Mavericks and Yosemite but I still look to third party app’s for most of my day to day needs. When Yosemite came out I nuked the iMac and dropped a few app’s so there are a few changes in the list. Hopefully there are one or two gems in the list that are new to you.

Alfred
http://www.alfredapp.com/
Free, PowerPack for £15

For a longtime I used Quicksilver and then Launchbar as a keyboard launcher but around three years ago I moved to Alfred and I just can’t let it go despite Spotlight catching up in Yosemite. Alfred allows you to drive your Mac fully from the keyboard – launch app’s, search the web etc. Buy the PowerPack and you can extend via scripts from the Alfred community or ones you write yourself, control iTunes and access a full clipboard history and also snippet library. A lovely app that will become your most used app if you let it. With Alfred Remote now out for iOS you can launch apps, scripts, URL’s etc from your iPad or iPhone. Already I have a podcast tab setup in remote so I can quickly setup or jump to app’s I need while podcasting. Despite having two screens, launching app’s quickly via touch is very useful.

Dropbox
http://www.dropbox.com
Free with paid options

I think everyone has a Dropbox account so there’s not too much to say with this one. I store all my documents in Dropbox so I can get them anywhere – Mac, iOS or on the web. Its great for sharing podcasts and files with the folk I work remotely with. Although there is only 2GB free, you can earn up to 18GB free and with so many app’s plugged into Dropbox via it’s API’s it’s a great way of sharing between desktop and mobile. It’s also reliable unlike iCloud.

SuperDuper!
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper
$27.95

Still my goto app for backups. What do you mean you don’t backup? Criminal. SuperDuper! creates a fully bootable backup on a drive of your choosing that should your drive or computer fail allows you to fully restore from that point in time. As it’s a bootable backup you can also boot from it should you find yourself in trouble. I’ve certainly needed it a couple of times and it’s never let me down. Backups can be scheduled and once the first backup is complete daily/weekly incrementals take no time at all.

backblazeBackblaze
https://www.backblaze.com
$5 a month

I use Backblaze for online backup of my computers. Unlike the other online services I tried, Backblaze is quick and reliable to upload data and supports unlimited amount of data. You can easily retrieve individual files and if the worst happens and you need everything you can download it all slowly or send of a disk to get your data more quickly.

evernoteEvernote
http://evernote.com/
Free, Premium account £35 per year

Evernote is my digital filing cabinet. Notes, images, pdf’s, web pages, receipts, bills, contacts, recipes, lists etc etc etc all go into Evernote. The client allows for rich enough text editing, images are OCR’d to allow for some great searching and there are good options for notebooks and folders. The web clipper works really well too. I upgraded to Premium which allows for 1GB of uploads per month, secure notes, collaborative notes and also a history of changes. One niggle – exporting from Evernote still not great so I’m tied into the service more than I’d like. The iOS apps are excellent too so my digital stuff is available everywhere.
Continue reading “Mac Apps 2015”

Apple has lost the functional high ground

Great post from Marco Arment on the quality of Apple software:

We don’t need major OS releases every year. We don’t need each OS release to have a huge list of new features. We need our computers, phones, and tablets to work well first so we can enjoy new features released at a healthy, gradual, sustainable pace.

Apple’s OS X and iOS releases have become quite unreliable over the last couple of years and the issues that I still have with iTunes, iTunes Match and iCloud give me no confidence that they will ever work without an issue at some point. For music it’s making me look seriously at Google Play and Spotify. Apple are lucky in that their major competitor on the desktop is Windows 8.

Apple’s hardware is hard to beat from a design and function perspective but their software has got disappointing. It wasn’t always the case and I hope they can get of the treadmill and focus on quality and reliability.

*Update* – it’s a year to the day since I posted about Apple’s poor software quality and hoped for a change in 2014. I didn’t realise when I read Marco’s post tonight and it was only when looking at today’s Timehop that I saw a link to the post. A year on and many of the issues are still present. Apple really needs to address this.

Gaming Treats

For a while I found gaming on iOS starting to stagnate. Too many free to play titles with horrible in app purchasing mechanisms, particularly from EA. However April has seen some great new releases:

Monument Valley
http://www.monumentvalleygame.com/
£2.49

At around 2 hours of gameplay many will dismiss Monument Valley but they are fools. FOOLS! This is a 10 level puzzle game that is more akin to a living M.C. Escher image than a game. The premise is simple – guide Ida to the end of the level by sliding and rotating elements of the level to allow her to complete the path.

Monument Valley
Monument Valley

It looks and sounds stunning and is such a satisfying fun game. In many ways the length is perfect as repetition is removed unlike so many games that are longer just because they can be, not for any good reason. If it still sounds too short and the screen above doesn’t convince you, the developer has announced this week that more levels are coming. There are no excuses left – just buy it.

FTL: Faster Than Light
http://www.ftlgame.com/
£6.99

A PC favourite, FTL is a real time strategy game based on your spaceship. Maybe more a resource management game but you take part in a variety of quests, battles and make choices throughout the game with the aim to save the galaxy with you in charge of your spaceship. It’s tough, especially as when you die you start from the beginning again. Works so well on the iPad benefiting greatly from the retina screen and the touch controls.

This is really addictive and each play through is unique adding to it’s shelf life. You can also take charge of different spaceships, again extending the game. Out of all the games on this post, I’d buy this one. Love it.

Hitman Go
http://hitman.com/launching-hitman-go/
£2.99

I had zero expectations for Hitman Go, expecting an arcade game or first person shooter but what Square Enix has released is a great looking turn based strategy. You control your agent, dictating which path he takes through a level solving various puzzles as you go.

Hitman Go
Hitman Go

The game is a looker and can be viewed from any angle and it’s great to see some of the big game developers developing unique mobile games rather than rushing out a crappy port. One note of caution is that there is an element of in app purchasing for hints and unlocks but they aren’t needed to play the game and it doesn’t get in the way when I’m playing. An impressive game which will take some time to complete.

Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft
http://us.battle.net/en/int?r=hearthstone
Free (with in-app purchase)

Hearthstone is a card collecting 1 vs 1 battle game. Collect cards and play friends or strangers in a number of different game modes. Presentation is fantastic and it’s a very addictive game. There is in app purchasing but it doesn’t blight the game and to be honest I’ve not needed to spend any money on the game. Excellent game and you can play against PC p;ayers too.

Dungeon Quest
http://dq.shinyboxgames.com/
Free (with in-app purchase)

Final game worth trying is Dungeon Quest. Don’t let the free and IAP tag put you off. This is a great little Diablo lite dungeon crawler that supports various classes and plays really well. Great for blasting through a few levels if you’ve got 20 mins to spare.

Dungeon Quest
Dungeon Quest

Hopefully there’s something in that list to tempt you and after months of meh, it’s a great time to game again on iOS.

Mac at 30

I first used a Mac at university in the early 90’s. It was in the university library and I’m pretty sure it was a Macintosh Plus. While it worked fine, it was a bit slow and nothing grabbed me about it so my first home computer was an Escom 486 and for years I was a Windows and PC user. It was my main games machine as the FPS market took off and the PC platform served me well for years.

The seed that started my move to Mac was in 2001 when the first iPod was announced. I’m pretty sure it was late 2002 or early 2003 before I finally picked up an iPod and suffered using Real software to sync my music on Windows. I loved the iPod. From the packaging to the ease of use, everything about it felt special compared to the competition. I still remember the button lights slowly fading – never got old.

Roll forward to 2006 and it was time to upgrade my PC, not to a newer model but making the switch to Apple. I bought a 21″ iMac and it was such a step change to what I had before. Quiet, fast and an amazing set of applications. A few months later and I bought a Macbook Pro. I was hooked.

Home Office
Home Office

Now I have a 27″ iMac, a Macbook Air, iPhone 5S, iPad Air and an Apple TV. Overkill but I still love Apple’s product design and software despite my recent moans. I didn’t expect much from Apple to celebrate that today was the 30th anniversary since the Macintosh was introduced but I was wrong. I guess time’s have changed since Steve Jobs passed away.

A beautiful website with a great interactive timeline showing the history of the Macintosh. It also wouldn’t right to not have a video from Apple celebrating the event.

There’s also an easter egg on the Apple site.

A custom font that shows each of the Macs from the last 30 years. Nice.

Despite the iPhone and iPad eating into it’s usage, I still wouldn’t be without one. Happy 30th Macintosh.

Apple in 2014

I use Apple products every day. iMac, Macbook Air, iPad and iPhone with a little bit of Apple TV thrown in for good measure. I love the hardware, it’s design and performance and the surrounding application ecosystem. As a combination they still can’t be beaten in my opinion. There is a growing problem though – Apple’s own software and services. The software isn’t as good as it used to be, the cloud services are buggy and unreliable and Apple seems to be doing very little to address the slide in quality over the past 2-3 years. This has to change.

A quick list of issues that have affected me over the past few months include:

iMessage
– Inconsistent as to which device will receive a message.
– Read once, mark everywhere – worked at the start of Mavericks but now only works sometimes.
– Sometimes slow delivery, sometimes none on a certain device. No pattern and easiest way to fix is sign out and in again on the affected device. That isn’t a solution.
iCloud
– Reminders – sometimes syncs properly and other times it feels like I have two separate todo lists and have to mark off completion of tasks in two places. Then a few days later they are back in sync.
– No faith that contacts and calendars are actually being synchronised correctly.
– Third party dev’s moving away from iCloud as a sync platform.
Mavericks
– Mail is awful. So many Gmail issues compared to Snow Leopard. The new fixes issued by Apple have addressed some but not all of the issues. Every few days I need to stop and start Mail just so I can receive new Mails that are flowing in fine on the iOS devices. Part of that may be down to Google not using standard IMAP?
– I want to use Safari as it’s fast and thanks to App Nap it will save battery life on the Macbook Air but it’s so fucking crashy. I can’t believe how unstable it is.
– Reminders, iCal, Contacts – still a poor usability experience from these core app’s.
– iBooks was new to the Mac and moved books from iTunes to iBooks but only those that you’ve purchased. Anything added manually has disappeared. Nice update.
iWork
– Updated across iOS and Mac by removing key functionality so that all platforms are in sync. I don’t have a problem with that approach, more the lack of any updates for 3-4 years and then someone hit’s a reset button this year. But don’t worry, some of the old features will return. Some? Any?
iLife
– Lot’s of love on iOS but hardly any on the Mac. The new Garageband also removed Podcast functionality.
iTunes
– Crashes often, library easily corrupted and I’ve no faith that it won’t happen again.
– Moved podcasts to Instacast which syncs properly across all devices and has had the side effect of improving iTunes.
iTunes Match
– A paid for service from Apple that when it works is brilliant but I’ve had a handful of issues since starting the service that requires me to stop the service on all devices and restart.
– Album art on iOS corrupted. Different covers for different albums. Small beer when I write it down but it frustrated the hell out of me. The only known solution – switch off iTunes Match, wipe any music from your iOS device and start again.
– Duplicated playlists – fine on the iPhone but duplicated 10 times over on the iPad. Solution – switch off iTunes Match, remove any downloaded music and start again.
– iTunes Match will randomly switch off on the iMac. No notice, it just does.
iOS
– Springboard in iOS 7 is really unstable. I see frequent Springboard restarts when I use the iPhone and the iPad has a couple of no icon app’s that work fine but don’t display the icon. It feels like an iOS beta on the iPhone at the moment rather than an OS that has been out for months.
– Apple really need to address some fundamentals like inter app operability as URL schemes aren’t a scalable solution. Let me choose my defaults app’s too. Mailbox and Chrome would be better iOS app’s if they could be treated as the default app’s for Mail and Web Browsing. Android is becoming a far more appealing option.
– iCloud backup doesn’t scale. The most you can buy is 50GB for £70 per year, yet I can buy a 128Gb iPad. Cloud backup should come free with each device and not be tied to an iCloud account. Buy an iOS device, get complementary cloud backup for free. Keep it simple.
– Newsstand – some magazine issues will auto download, some won’t. I see the badge indicating a new issue but opening Newsstand I see nothing against any of the news applications. Apple should kill Newsstand and publishers should just have their own stand alone app’s. Newsstand is broken.
– App Store – doesn’t scale, reviews are an issue and Apple seem to be doing very little about that.

Quite a list. Everybody wants Apple to launch a new product category in 2014 – a true TV solution, a smart watch, a larger iPad. I’d rather see them address the software quality issues that can be seen throughout their portfolio before they jump onto something new and I’m not alone. Unfortunately it will never happen – the market demands new hardware and software rarely gets attention, but it’s critical. It’s the lifeblood of the platform and it’s disappointing that Apple’s are often the poor option on a given platform. I look at the Verge investigation into webOS and what could have been with envy. Not just a striking similarity to the visual leap that iOS 7 made but real forward steps with usability on a mobile platform. Maybe in iOS 8 but I doubt it.

What stung the most in all this was a blog post about Evernote. Jason Kincaid posted a couple of days ago on Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant. As an Evernote user myself I’d noticed a dip in quality too particularly with the browser snapshot extensions. The next day saw Evernote’s CEO, Phil Rubin, reply on the Evernote Blog – On Software Quality and Building a Better Evernote in 2014. Time will tell if Evernote’s quality will improve but it was a great response in public acknowledging and committing to resolving software quality. If only Apple were as open and honest.

I used to tell people ‘it just works’ when discussing Apple products. Not any more.

iPad Air

When the iPad was first announced I scoffed at it. Who’d want a bigger iPod Touch? More fool me. I loved the first iPad and jumped on the first retina iPad when it came out in March 2012. I loved it but as time went on it was obvious that it was underpowered and was struggling to throw all those pixels around. October 2012 saw Apple release a fourth generation iPad with a better CPU but that was too soon for me to upgrade. iOS 7 didn’t help and only highlighted the third gen’s performance problems. They also released an iPad Mini but that was non-retina so I always knew my iPad upgrade would probably be this year and involve a choice between a new iPad and a retina Mini.

So in late November after much deliberation I plumped for an iPad Air. I love it.

iPad Air
iPad Air

The iPad Air and Retina Mini are more similar than I expected. They have the same processor, memory, M7 chip, come with the same capacities and both have 4G options. They even have the same pixel count – the only difference is size and weight which made the choice a difficult one.

Ultimately what swung it for me was the usability of the larger screen over the smaller one. Reading both books and comics was better on the Air and the virtual keyboard was easier to use for me on the Air. A part of that is probably just me being used to the size so your mileage will vary. What was surprising was how close the weight of each device felt. The Air weighs 478g against the Mini’s 341g but in practice they felt closer. The Mini felt denser and ultimately I preferred the feel of the Air in my hand. It was much lighter than expected especially as I was used to the third gen iPad weight at 668g’s.

Heavier than the Air
Paper notebook now heavier than the Air
The A7 chip and the power it delivers felt more noticeable on the iPad against the iPhone 5s. Again that might be because I’m used to the third gen performance but iOS and app’s felt so snappy on the iPad Air. App’s loaded quickly, game performance was so much better and swapping between app’s made iOS 7 feel far more complete on the Air. All combined, the Air has been a great upgrade for me. One surprising aspect hit me a few days after use. The drop in weight of the iPad Air has now made it lighter than my usual work notebook which weighs in at a mighty 580g. Thats for a 200 page A4 paper pad. I can now swap that for a lighter iPad Air that can do everything a paper pad can do plus so much more. The iPad Air feels like the iPad that matches the ambition that Apple had when Steve Jobs showed it for the first time in January 2010. A lot has changed in 4 years – that original iPad looks massive now yet much remains the same. 9.7″ screen, physical home button and a familiar design. The only feature I miss is Touch ID. I am constantly trying to unlock the Air by touching the home button. Damn you Apple.

Logitech Ultrathin Cover
Logitech Ultrathin Cover
I say Touch ID is the only feature I miss. This isn’t strictly true. There are times that a physical keyboard would be great for taking notes or updating documents on the go. Yes, I could use a laptop but I can do 95% of my work on an iPad so for those infrequent times I want a physical keyboard I’ve picked up a Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard Cover. This acts as a screen protector when carrying and does increase the weight but includes a great physical keyboard that works over bluetooth. I’m OK at using the virtual keyboard but still feel more comfortable using physical keys that I can touch. The keys are smaller than a full size keyboard and initially I’m finding some letters are constantly being missed – A is always an S at the moment. However it’s been working well and the keyboard shortcuts that you can use on iOS especially for selecting blocks of text are great when compared to their touch equivalents. The logitech matches the ipad colour eactly but feels a bit plastic in comparison. Also, it’s another device that needs to be charged although a charge seemingly lasts for around 3 months assuming a couple of hours use per day which is good. Definitely a niche requirement but I’d wanted one for around a year and waited until I swapped to a newer iPad design. It will be interesting to see how my usage fairs over the coming months.

I can’t recommend the iPad Air strongly enough. Fast, light with a great screen and an amazing software library. I’m looking forward to developers pushing the A7 chip to see what the Air and iOS can really deliver.

iOS 7 and those new iPads

It’s been a few weeks since Apple released iOS 7. Has it caused much change?

My iPhone home screen using iOS 6
My iPhone home screen using iOS6
Home screen on the 5s on iOS 7
Home screen on the 5s

It surprises me in that short time how dated the iOS 6 screenshot looks. Not sure if thats down to familiarisation from day to day usage of iOS 7 but it just screams ‘old’ when I look at it. On the surface many app’s look the same but most if not all the home screen app’s have seen updates over the last 6 weeks with some bringing considerable new functionality.

Take Fantastical for example. A new version came out with not only an updated look for iOS 7 but integrating reminders alongside appointments. A small change but one that has led me to using Apple Reminders rather than Wunderlist which I’d moved to from Omnifocus as it was over the top for my needs. iOS 7 has kickstarted a simplification of my app’s and services I use.

Next was removing my reliance on Apple for podcasts and switching to Instacast – should have done it months ago as listening to podcasts is a far better experience and iTunes is more stable now that I’ve removed podcasts from it. Coincidence?

Unfortunately there are still some ugly aspects of iOS 7 that irritate all the time. That Safari icon is one of them. It annoys me so much that I may switch to using Chrome on iOS as that’s what I use on the laptop and desktop. iOS 7 is also quite crashy, especially on the iPad. Hopefully a 7.1 update will remove the stability issues if not the ugly icons (agreeing with Shak that Contacts is ugly too).

Overall though I’m happy with iOS 7, the updates it’s made and the new direction it’s taking alongside the many many great app updates from third parties.

iPad

iOS 7 on the iPad
iOS 7 on the iPad

Alongside the crashy nature of iOS 7 on the iPad there’s something about it’s look that just doesn’t feel right. There is so much space and the app’s look lost on the bigger screen. Why not a fifth row? Why do folders only show 9 app’s at a time – it feels like a toy town O/S in some of the views which I’d never say about iOS 6 or the current versions of Android. Performance on my third gen iPad is also spotty so I’ve disabled most of the animations which helps but I still notice keyboard lag and stutter from time to time.

Of course, the iPad Air is now out and performance of the new device is amazing thanks to the new chip’s being used. I popped into the Apple store at the weekend and what stood out the most was the weight of the new iPad Air. More to the point, the lack of weight.

Not the screen, not the smaller design, the thinner design or the lack of Touch ID. The weight difference compared to my gen 3 iPad was more than I expected. I was convinced that a Mini Retina would be my next iPad but it will probably be an iPad Air. Yes, probably.

I’m not yet 100% that I need to replace the iPad right now. While I may want to replace it, need is something entirely different. So I will hang fire for the time being, compare it to the Mini Retina to make doubly sure and wait and see what app updates will come over the next few months that take advantage of the new chipset. Once I do decide I will definitely pick up one of these Logitech keyboards for the iPad – I think they are awesome.