Last year when Apple first announced the iPad I blogged my initial reaction to the product. After a year and having had several opportunities to use the iPad for various lengths of time, some of my options have changed with time.
Last week Apple announced the iPad2 and I have some quick initial thoughts from seeing the keynote and reading up on some of the tech sites.
Multitasking – This has been solved with software, although the new processor will greatly help this. As the owner of of a non multitasking iPhone 3, that have been several occasions where I wanted multi-tasking.
Cameras – A logical addition that should have been on the first iPad. The new unit has front and read facing cameras. I think the front camera is going to be used by far more people using Facetime.
Flash plugin – Still not available and likely not to appear anytime soon as Steve Jobs has said it will not be on the device. More and more sites are going to html5 and if one needs flash there are ways to do it from what I understand.
iPad 2 is thinner and a bit lighter. One of the things I noticed about the original iPad is that it seemed a just a bit too heavy. This may be more of a personal thing but I’m not the only one I’ve heard say that.
One of my original concerns with the iPad was what role in would serve, in particular I wondered if it could replace a netbook. After having a chance to play with some friends iPad’s, I feel now it can be used in place as a netbook or laptop for most general purposes. if you want a laptop to do gaming or heavy coding then the iPad still is not the best choice.
Once the iPads start shipping to people it will be interesting to see what their reactions will be.
This weekend a group of folks have gotten together for Open Data London’s first hackathon. The goal is to create a web and mobile application that will allow citizens of London to be able to look up when their garbage and recycle days will be. Some feature will include email notification the day before garbage so you are not rushing to beat the garbage truck in the morning!
The group is working in the newly created Unlondon UnLab another project I’ve been assisting on. One of UnLondon’s goal is to facilitate new ideas new ideas that will help the community and it’s members.
From what I’ve seen this weekend things are well under way.
There is a live stream running from the UnLab this weekend at http://www.livestream.com/unlablondon
Had a great evening at IgniteLondon.
Ignite is a series of 5 minute talks by people about any topic they are passionate about. The main catch is that you have 20 slides and they change every 15 seconds out of the speakers control.
The first Ignite was held in 2006 in Seattle, Washington, and more then 50 other cities have had events. A great way to get a cross section of idea and build community connections. The event was standing room only and another one is schedule for October. Well worth coming out to the next one.
Quite a few twitter regulars from the area were at the event and you can review the twitter livestream to get and idea on how the evening went.
This is old news but worth repeating. Support for Windows XP with service pack 2 ends today. What this means is that from now on, Service Pack 3 will be required to receive support and hotfixes for Windows XP.
If you have automatic updates on, you will have Service Pack 3 already. For those that don’t I recommend you either turn on automatic updates or download sp3 manually and install it. Paul Thurrott has an excellent FAQ for SP3 for those interested.
Those of you running Vista and Window 7 do not have to worry as support is still active for these products.
My best recommendation is to considering upgrading a new operating system like Windows 7.
Tech Stuff | scadmin | 
March 7, 2011 10:12 am | 
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