I recently got an ipad 3 and I'm very very disappointed. Specifically for an Indian scenario the ipad just isn't the right device. Perhaps there are less issues if you are used to other apple products and their overall design philosophy of form over function.
In the end after the initial shock wore off I resigned to the fact that it was a decent ebook reader and casual web reader.
1) The ipad has extremely limited storage space. 16GB is peanuts. That's like 2 hi-res photo albums or 6 movies. Do not think it will double up as a photo repository where you store tons of photos. This is an incredibly wrong heavily marketed myth.
2) Copying files (music/video) from your PC to the ipad isn't trivial. You have to use itunes - bloatware that constantly crashes. You can't easily copy files one-way and every time you copy stuff you have to "synch" - this essentially means backing up 16GB of data every time. If you have your OS on your PC on an SSD this is a nightmare (you'll have to mess around with symlinks or a variety of 3rd party apps).
3) The ipad has very poor support for different media file types. If you download a movie in .mkv, .divx, .flv or music in .ogg it won't play. You have to convert the video on your PC to an accepted format to watch it on an ipad. Conversion even on a high end PC can take 10-15 minutes per file. Since in India a lot of the media content is from questionable sources and bandwidth is an issue; high compression encodings are commonplace. Not being able to access them on an ipad is painful. Just forget about watching your favorite american TV shows on the ipad. Not only is space a problem file conversion is too much of a pain for it to be worth the trouble (I'm watching Game of Thrones, Community and the Wire currently - not on the ipad lol).
4) The ipad isn't really as portable as claimed - it's quite heavy and doesn't fit in your pocket. You can't really easily carry it around with you. It's not that amazing for bedtime reading since after a while your hands will ache holding it up. It doesn't in any way replace a book, for example. Since you'll want to rest it on a flat surface anyway, why not just get a laptop ?
5) Since Apple is firmly against all forms of pirated content and software; if we are to be realistic in an Indian scenario the consequences aren't too pretty. Apple intentionally cripples its own OS and has premium apps to do very basic things. So you're looking at a steady stream of $5-10 to do basic things.
6) Typing on an ipad isn't comfortable. Apple doesn't even want to make it easier and won't allow apps like swype to streamline typing. You can buy a detachable keyboard but that's around $50-60.
7) Although the screen is extremely high res; the touch screen isn't very precision at all. You will frequently misclick stuff and this is really annoying on slow indian connections. You can't really use a stylus pen properly because of the piss poor accuracy.
9) There is no back button like smartphones/android devices/PC.
10) Multitasking is really awkward. Although the ipad3 supports multitasking, it's not even close to what you would expect from a windows PC. Not having a task manager or control over apps to shut them down is annoying.
11) The Browser isn't that good. Neither safari or dolphin (the favorite web browser app) come anywhere close to the likes of IE9, Opera, Firefox or even Chrome. It's really odd that there's opera mini for smartphones but none for the ipad.
12) Gaming. Although it's not really something Indians do; it begs mention since gaming is such a heavily marketed feature. Gaming on the ipad is abysmal. You only have access to a handful of free games, and even then the games are terrible casual garbage like angry birds or 1 minute bejewelled. Don't expect to play diablo 3 or call of duty type games.
13) Completely locked in to Apple verified apps since the ipad 3 isn't jailbroken yet.
14) Since voltage fluctuations are common in India the charger (which hilariously uses a USB cord lulz) gets incredibly hot.
15) Photo management. If you have a hi-res SLR or prosumer camera; copying files to the ipad is a pain. First off you need a camera connection kit which is $20-30. There is little control on what is being copied and you'll fill up your pathetic 16 gigs from 1 set of pics from your camera. It won't be compressed so each image will be 5-6 megs.
On top of all this once you copy, say, 500 photos. There's no easy way to delete lots of them (say you take a bunch of shots, some are trash and you want to delete them, or you want to delete an entire folder). You have to select each file and delete individually. There is no select all or delete all option. Laughable isn't it ?
16) Gaming - emulators. Many people enjoy playing 8/16 bit games of yesteryear on mobile devices laptops (old school mario, zelda etc). Again apple dislikes the legal implications of these so completely disallows any kind of emulation.
17) Abysmal free app support. Unlike android free apps aren't all that good. Most "free" apps are shabby trialware or shareware type stuff.
18) Does not support flash. Neither dolphin nor safari support flash and this means tons of websites won't show animations or just not work at all. It's not really something you can ignore when current tablet hardware can quite easily support flash.
19) No USB support - you can't connect thumb drives, printers, gamepads, mice or any USB device.
20) Lack of a good file explorer. It's hard to tell how much space is taken up by what, organizing files and managing/deleting them. It's trivial on an android smartphone; not so much on an ipad.
21) No cd/dvd support. Want to watch a movie on a dvd ? well sorry f%^% you.
22) No support for ADSL/DSL or thumbdrive wifi (no usb
). This means you have to buy a fairly expensive wifi router for your ipad. But be warned indian buildings with reinforced concrete floors+pillars and brick and mortar walls are terrible for wifi penetration.
23) Does not support comic book reader file types or certain features in pdfs. Takes a lot of time (20+ seconds)to load images in large pdfs (100mb+).
24) iCloud - another heavily marketed but totally pointless feature in an India context; along with all forms of cloud computing which receives considerable media hype. What's the point of storing massive amounts of data online when internet is a)slow b) limited and c) expensive ?
These things make start making sense with unlimited 20 Mbps or higher connections. Not on sh1tty 1mbps lines with pathetic limits (FUP), horrible packet loss, jitter and latency.
25) Crappy network management. There's no way to easily check what apps are using the internet, what's being downloaded or updated and so on; it just "happens". There's a lack of control.
There isn't an easy to figure out network strength/packet loss on Wifi : on a laptop I can quickly pull up a ping or run d3tr and see if something is wrong with my connection; then reconnect to get a new gateway. Not really feasible on the ipad. Again, tablets are 1st world devices where bandwidth is a non-issue.
26) Weak Wifi receiver. The ipad 3 isn't good at picking up weak wifi signals. You'll find that a laptop can easily pick them up but the ipad can't. wifi connectivity is sluggish.
27) Slippery. This is again a problem with the form factor and build that apple doesn't want to change. It's very easy to drop it given how slippery the metallic surface is.
28) Overheating with 3d games. There's probably something wrong with the cooling, but if you play 3d games for a few hours the device gets uncomfortably hot.
29) Battery takes a very long time to charge (4-5 hours)
BUT
I'm not saying the ipad is a bad tablet. Right now it's easily the best tablet in the market. The problem is that in India it really has too many issues to be a purchase that's really worth it. In fact, *any* tablet is a very questionable purchase in India.
It's ok if you want a casual web reader and it really is the best way to view colorful pdf docs.
Perhaps though, it's far better to wait, or get a smaller laptop, a netbook or a larger smartphone (samsung galaxy note for example), or just stick with your current smartphone. Maybe someday android will catch up and things that are priced competitively and are comparable to the Asus transformer prime will be available.
In the end after the initial shock wore off I resigned to the fact that it was a decent ebook reader and casual web reader.
1) The ipad has extremely limited storage space. 16GB is peanuts. That's like 2 hi-res photo albums or 6 movies. Do not think it will double up as a photo repository where you store tons of photos. This is an incredibly wrong heavily marketed myth.
2) Copying files (music/video) from your PC to the ipad isn't trivial. You have to use itunes - bloatware that constantly crashes. You can't easily copy files one-way and every time you copy stuff you have to "synch" - this essentially means backing up 16GB of data every time. If you have your OS on your PC on an SSD this is a nightmare (you'll have to mess around with symlinks or a variety of 3rd party apps).
3) The ipad has very poor support for different media file types. If you download a movie in .mkv, .divx, .flv or music in .ogg it won't play. You have to convert the video on your PC to an accepted format to watch it on an ipad. Conversion even on a high end PC can take 10-15 minutes per file. Since in India a lot of the media content is from questionable sources and bandwidth is an issue; high compression encodings are commonplace. Not being able to access them on an ipad is painful. Just forget about watching your favorite american TV shows on the ipad. Not only is space a problem file conversion is too much of a pain for it to be worth the trouble (I'm watching Game of Thrones, Community and the Wire currently - not on the ipad lol).
4) The ipad isn't really as portable as claimed - it's quite heavy and doesn't fit in your pocket. You can't really easily carry it around with you. It's not that amazing for bedtime reading since after a while your hands will ache holding it up. It doesn't in any way replace a book, for example. Since you'll want to rest it on a flat surface anyway, why not just get a laptop ?
5) Since Apple is firmly against all forms of pirated content and software; if we are to be realistic in an Indian scenario the consequences aren't too pretty. Apple intentionally cripples its own OS and has premium apps to do very basic things. So you're looking at a steady stream of $5-10 to do basic things.
6) Typing on an ipad isn't comfortable. Apple doesn't even want to make it easier and won't allow apps like swype to streamline typing. You can buy a detachable keyboard but that's around $50-60.
7) Although the screen is extremely high res; the touch screen isn't very precision at all. You will frequently misclick stuff and this is really annoying on slow indian connections. You can't really use a stylus pen properly because of the piss poor accuracy.
9) There is no back button like smartphones/android devices/PC.
10) Multitasking is really awkward. Although the ipad3 supports multitasking, it's not even close to what you would expect from a windows PC. Not having a task manager or control over apps to shut them down is annoying.
11) The Browser isn't that good. Neither safari or dolphin (the favorite web browser app) come anywhere close to the likes of IE9, Opera, Firefox or even Chrome. It's really odd that there's opera mini for smartphones but none for the ipad.
12) Gaming. Although it's not really something Indians do; it begs mention since gaming is such a heavily marketed feature. Gaming on the ipad is abysmal. You only have access to a handful of free games, and even then the games are terrible casual garbage like angry birds or 1 minute bejewelled. Don't expect to play diablo 3 or call of duty type games.
13) Completely locked in to Apple verified apps since the ipad 3 isn't jailbroken yet.
14) Since voltage fluctuations are common in India the charger (which hilariously uses a USB cord lulz) gets incredibly hot.
15) Photo management. If you have a hi-res SLR or prosumer camera; copying files to the ipad is a pain. First off you need a camera connection kit which is $20-30. There is little control on what is being copied and you'll fill up your pathetic 16 gigs from 1 set of pics from your camera. It won't be compressed so each image will be 5-6 megs.
On top of all this once you copy, say, 500 photos. There's no easy way to delete lots of them (say you take a bunch of shots, some are trash and you want to delete them, or you want to delete an entire folder). You have to select each file and delete individually. There is no select all or delete all option. Laughable isn't it ?
16) Gaming - emulators. Many people enjoy playing 8/16 bit games of yesteryear on mobile devices laptops (old school mario, zelda etc). Again apple dislikes the legal implications of these so completely disallows any kind of emulation.
17) Abysmal free app support. Unlike android free apps aren't all that good. Most "free" apps are shabby trialware or shareware type stuff.
18) Does not support flash. Neither dolphin nor safari support flash and this means tons of websites won't show animations or just not work at all. It's not really something you can ignore when current tablet hardware can quite easily support flash.
19) No USB support - you can't connect thumb drives, printers, gamepads, mice or any USB device.
20) Lack of a good file explorer. It's hard to tell how much space is taken up by what, organizing files and managing/deleting them. It's trivial on an android smartphone; not so much on an ipad.
21) No cd/dvd support. Want to watch a movie on a dvd ? well sorry f%^% you.
22) No support for ADSL/DSL or thumbdrive wifi (no usb
). This means you have to buy a fairly expensive wifi router for your ipad. But be warned indian buildings with reinforced concrete floors+pillars and brick and mortar walls are terrible for wifi penetration.23) Does not support comic book reader file types or certain features in pdfs. Takes a lot of time (20+ seconds)to load images in large pdfs (100mb+).
24) iCloud - another heavily marketed but totally pointless feature in an India context; along with all forms of cloud computing which receives considerable media hype. What's the point of storing massive amounts of data online when internet is a)slow b) limited and c) expensive ?
These things make start making sense with unlimited 20 Mbps or higher connections. Not on sh1tty 1mbps lines with pathetic limits (FUP), horrible packet loss, jitter and latency.
25) Crappy network management. There's no way to easily check what apps are using the internet, what's being downloaded or updated and so on; it just "happens". There's a lack of control.
There isn't an easy to figure out network strength/packet loss on Wifi : on a laptop I can quickly pull up a ping or run d3tr and see if something is wrong with my connection; then reconnect to get a new gateway. Not really feasible on the ipad. Again, tablets are 1st world devices where bandwidth is a non-issue.
26) Weak Wifi receiver. The ipad 3 isn't good at picking up weak wifi signals. You'll find that a laptop can easily pick them up but the ipad can't. wifi connectivity is sluggish.
27) Slippery. This is again a problem with the form factor and build that apple doesn't want to change. It's very easy to drop it given how slippery the metallic surface is.
28) Overheating with 3d games. There's probably something wrong with the cooling, but if you play 3d games for a few hours the device gets uncomfortably hot.
29) Battery takes a very long time to charge (4-5 hours)
BUT
I'm not saying the ipad is a bad tablet. Right now it's easily the best tablet in the market. The problem is that in India it really has too many issues to be a purchase that's really worth it. In fact, *any* tablet is a very questionable purchase in India.
It's ok if you want a casual web reader and it really is the best way to view colorful pdf docs.
Perhaps though, it's far better to wait, or get a smaller laptop, a netbook or a larger smartphone (samsung galaxy note for example), or just stick with your current smartphone. Maybe someday android will catch up and things that are priced competitively and are comparable to the Asus transformer prime will be available.
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