I love my iPad and considering the amount of staff where I work who’ve acquired one since its launch nearly two years ago and especially this Christmas you just get the feeling that the momentum behind the ‘only’ tablet is just going to continue to snowball. But even though they are all converts to Apple’s immature platform the one thing that they all ask for is Windows and Office functionality and finally I can say… you can have it!
So another year is nearly at an end and what a geeky year it’s been. I have completely overdosed on tech and I can feel a hangover coming on so before I eat that cold kebab from the night before it’s worth a quick look at the high’s of 2011.
With the death of the TouchPad and the fact that Android doesn’t seem to know what it is doing the tablet space it would seem that the iPad has no credible rival, that is until now. Enter the Amazon Kindle Fire, a 7″ dual core tablet sporting a fork of the Android OS that seems to be getting everything right. So why is that?
First of all, before I start this post I do have to admit to loving my iPad (for gawd sake I have 3) but that’s nothing to do with it. I want you to run with this post knowing that fact and see what I think about competition and the dominance that Apple seem to be ruthlessly carving into the industry.
When the iPad 2 was released earlier this year I didn’t get the usual feeling you get from an updated Apple release. Not like the difference between and iPhone 3GS and an iPhone 4. On paper there really wasn’t much, apart from a couple of cameras that differentiated the new model from the previous generation if you planned to use it solely for its prime purpose, a device to consume media. So as such and an iPad 1 owner I was still pretty happy with my original purchase and saw no need to upgrade to the newer device. That was until, unfortunately I held the iPad 2 in my hands (damn you visits to the Apple Store) at that point everything changed.