Moms Use iPads, Singles Use iPhones, Study Finds

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From Laptopmagazine. Product reviews and advice for best reference

DisplayMate: New iPad’s Display Bests Competition, but Still Room for Improvement

Over at DisplayMate, Dr. Raymond M. Soneira has published a pretty thorough evaluation of the new iPad’s 2048 x 1536 Retina display—and the verdict is that it’s pretty darn impressive.

Soneira compared the latest iPad to the iPad 2 and the iPhone 4 (which, incidentally, apparently outperforms the iPhone 4S on the screen front) by running the devices through tests for screen reflections, brightness, viewing angles, colors and intensities, running time on battery and more. The results? The new iPad’s display is leaps and bounds better than what you’ll find on the iPad 2, along with virtually all other tablets on the market.

The new iPad’s screen stands out especially for its improved sharpness and color saturation. When it comes to power consumption, the iPhone 4's display guzzles less energy, but that hardly means it offers a superior viewing experience.

The bottom line: The new iPad’s display is first-in-class, but DisplayMate sees room for improvement with all mobile screens. Automatic brightness, screen reflectance, the ambient light sensor and more could all get better according to the organization, but then we’d hardly expect Apple’s latest tablet to be the end-all, be-all in display technology, would we?

via DisplayMate

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Apple Sells Three Million New iPads over Launch Weekend

Apple has released an amazing figure that will surely be remembered among the hallowed numbers of its product launches. The company sold 3 million new iPads over the weekend since its March 16 launch, with Apple SVP of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller calling this the company’s “strongest iPad launch yet.”

No numbers were available for the first weekend sales of the iPad 2 (since there was an extremely short supply of units at the time), but analysts estimated that the number hoevered somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million units. To put things into context, this means the new iPad launch did roughly three times as well as the iPad 2's launch last year.

Back in 2010, over 300,000 original iPads were sold on the tablet’s launch day, and it took the company 28 days in total to move 1 million units. It then took Apple 80 days to sell 3 million iPads.

During an early morning conference call held Monday, Apple CEO Tim Cook hinted that the company experienced a “record weekend” for the new iPad, but declined to report any hard numbers. Turns out he may just have wanted to keep his audience in suspense: Eight hours later, Apple officially announced the staggering 3 million figure.

In comparison, 4 million units of the iPhone 4S were sold in its first weekend, though it’s worth noting that the iPhone 4S had a lower $199 price. At this point, it almost seems like the juggernaut Apple can do no wrong.

via Apple

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Away from Apples Stores, iPads Often Easy to Find

NEW YORK — “We still have some,” said a Best Buy employee about 1 AM this morning when I asked if I could buy a new iPad at the company’s 24-hour story in Manhattan.

Best Buy’s iPad sale was a bit on the down-low. “We didn’t advertise it,” said the employee. “But if people called, we told them they could get it.” He was holding a stack of folders, each labeled with a different configuration and filled with “tickets” — sheets of paper that corresponded to the number of those models left.

A few of the configurations had sold out by then. According to another employee, the “connected” (cellular enabled) models were very popular and the first to go.

Snagging an iPad wasn’t just a trick for people who knew about that one Manhattan store. Walmarts around the U.S. are selling the base, $499 model of the new iPad, and many of them started at 12:01 AM, as well.

No one was sleeping on the sidewalk in front of a Radio Shack on 14th Street in New York. And, like the down-low nature of the Best Buy down the street, this Radio Shack didn’t have any signage announcing the new iPad.

But based on a call we made on Thursday evening (March 15), we learned that it would be selling the tablets at 8 AM — the same time that damp, chilled folks camping outside the Apple stores would be shuffling inside. By then, the night owl customers from Best Buy and Walmart might be sleeping late, hugging their new iPads like teddy bears.

Article provided by TechNewsDaily, a sister site to Laptopmag.com.

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Tablet Chip Showdown: Nvidia Tegra 3 vs. the New iPad’s A5X

When GLBenchmark ran the Geometric test (vertex weighted), which measures low-level shader performance, the new iPad processed 7,530,524 frames at a rate of 57 fps while the Tegra 3-based Transformer Prime processed just 3,523,926 at a rate of 27 fps. We saw the same trend on the program’s Fill test, which measures texturing speed, as the iPad processed 1.98 billion textels per second to the Prime’s 404.61 million.

On Geekbench, a cross-platform benchmark that measures raw processing power rather than graphics, the quad-core Tegra 3 blew its competitor way as it achieved an overall score of 1,571 to the A5X’s 692. On the integer (1391 to 614), floating point (2408 to 825) and memory subtests (1076 to 784) , the Tegra 3 dominated, but the A5X bested it by a small margin of 324 to 266 on the stream subtest.

We also tested the new iPad’s Safari browser performance on two synthetic benchmarks and compared the results to those on the Transformer Prime’s stock Android browser. In Peacekeeper, a general-purpose browser benchmark, the two tablets got nearly identical scores of 386 for the iPad and 387 for the Prime. However, the iPad completed the Sunspider JavaScript rendering test in just 1810 milliseconds to the Prime’s 2216 ms. 

Unfortunately, since the two tablets use two different browsers, it’s impossible to isolate the processor’s role in giving the iPad slightly faster Sunspider results. It’s quite possible that Safari just performs better on this test than the Android 4.0 browser does.

Evaluating gaming performance on any tablet is a mainly subjective task, because there’s no benchmark that measures framerates like FRAPs does in Windows. However, we attempted to see what the differences in appearance were when we played the same game on both devices and placed them side by side. 

When we fired up the jet ski racing game Riptide GP on both devices, we noticed immediately that images looked sharper and more colorful on the new iPad’s retina display. Edges of objects like our avatar’s ski jacket, the walls on the racing course, and the writing on the scoreboard looked so much crisper on the iPad’s 2048 x 1536 screen and colors just popped a lot more than on the Transformer’s 1280 x 800 display. The difference in screen quality was only a little less pronounced when we played the third-person shooter game Shadowgun.

However, when we looked past the beautiful screen, we noticed that the version of the game playing on the Transformer Prime had some additional visual effects that were not present on the new iPad.  In Riptide, we noticed more reflections in the water and a splashing effect that made it look like water was hitting the screen when our ski landed from a jump. On the iPad, we just saw a little foam appear on landing, not splashes.

In Shadowgun, we walked into a scene with a burning helicopter and, on both devices, saw gorgeous billows of smoke and fire rising up to the sky. However, only on the Tegra 3-powered Transformer Prime, did the game show two flags billowing in the wind; the flags weren’t even there on the iPad version.

Our experience playing Shadowgun and Riptide on the two tablets shows how difficult it is to separate processor performance from other system components like the screen. It’s likely that, if we could put a gorgeous 2048 x 1536 screen on the Transformer Prime, these games would have both the great special effects and the sharp, beautiful images.

However, comparing tablet-to-tablet rather than chip-to-chip, the iPad’s screen makes the gaming experience a much tastier visual feast than you get on the Transformer Prime. We hope that upcoming higher-res Android tablets like the 1920 x 1200 screened Transformer Prime TF701 will give mobile gamers the perfect combination of special effects and sharp, vibrant images.

It is also possible that, once developers rework their games for the new iPad’s A5X chip, we’ll see the same kind of added special effects that we see with Tegra 3. Neither Shadowgun nor Riptide has yet been optimized for the A5X chip, so who knows what they will look like in their next iOS iterations. For now, its clear that the A5X offers better benchmark performance, while Tegra 3-optimized games offer more and better visual effects. 

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