Speak New Zilund? Hands on with the new iPad (inc VIDEO)

So far I’ve only had a few hours with the new iPad, but here are some first impressions.

VOICE DICTATION:

The iPad 3 adds a microphone, and Siri-style voice dictation feature (and yup, for the sake of convenience I am going to call it the iPad 3 rather than it's official name - simply "iPad").

The software side of it is not branded “Siri”, but follows the same paradigm as the iPhone 4S’ voice assistant. That is, it sends your voice to an Apple data centre, then the transcription back to your device. That means quality is dependent, in part, on the quality of your wi-fi or cellular connection. Even on a fast connection, it’s always a couple of beats behind your natural speech. It does catch up, but it’s disconcerting and throws you off your rhythm.

The AFR savaged the voice dictation feature, which you can enable with a tap of a microphone icon on the onscreen keyboard.

I found it pretty good:

ABOVE: NBR Steadi-cam captures the new iPad's voice dictation in action.

Like Siri, it’s not optimised for the New Zealand accent. There are UK, US and Australian accent options. I chose UK.

I’ve got a reasonably thick Kiwi accent, but Siri seemed to handle it okay. As ever with voice software, it depends on how clearly you talk, which can be wearing for a slovenly Waikato lad like myself.

The above video is typical of the accuracy I achieved over many goes. That is, okay, but not stunning. For touch-typists it’s slower than typing once you’ve gone back and fixed errors. Still, interesting, and more power to Apple for pushing voice recognition into the mainstream.

THE SCREEN
The "Retina" display is a thing of wonder. It has a million more pixels than the iPad 2 (it's 2048 by 1536 pixels to its predecessor's 1024 by 768).

Any chump can pack in pixels, but the retina display has a glossy magazine look, and doesn't produce nosie or pixelation with fast moving images (no doubt the quad core processing power helps in that department). The constrast and colours are beautiful.

Yes, as the New York Times pointed out, it does make low-rez website images look even more rubbish, and the average site isn't going to add super high resolution images any tiime soon. 

It helps that you can take your own HD photos and videos using the iPad's rear camera (bumped up to 5mP and now featuring the same optics and image-stabilisation technology as the iPhone 4S).

But even everyday stuff looks better on the Retina display. I use Amazon's Kindle software for iPad (and Android) and text looks noticeably better on the Retina display. Even just little stuff looks sharper. I've seen detail in people's Twitter avatar's I never picked up before, for example.

The display is still in the 4:3 ratio, rather than the 16:9 ratio used by Android tablets. 16:9 is better for video in that it's the same ration used by widescreen TVs and almost all HD video content. But personally I prefer 4:3 for web surfing and other activities outside full-screen video. 

Now that it's price has been chopped back to $576, the 16GB Wi-Fi iPad 2 is a pretty attractive buy. The new iPad's retina display is the best reason to pass it by in favour of the new model (which sells from $726 in its 16GB Wi-Fi version; see full pricing here).

THE HEAT

Consumer Reports managed to heat up the new iPad to 46.7 degrees while gaming. I haven't found heat an issue at all during a few hours messing around with photos, video, web browsing, and GarageBand - which one would have to assume is a fairly processor-intensive application. Smells a bit like a case of Consumer Reports being desperate to file the first backlash story (I subscribe to Consumer Reports, incidentally, and rate the US publication's work overall).

THE WEIGHT

The new iPad is marginally (0.6mm) thicker and 50g heavier than the iPad 2.

I wouldn't have noticed the extra thickness if it hadn't been pointed out. 

Regardless, I find Apple's Smart Cover fiddly and annoying and use an old-school big wraparound cover that chunks out the tablet regardless.

I fancy I do notice the extra weight. At the end of the day, 50g is no big deal, but I wish Apple had gone in other other direction.

I use the software version of Amazon's Kindle a lot, and ideally the new iPad would be half it's weight for comfortable extended reading (the iPad 3 is 652g or 662 with 4G; about double the weigh of a Kindle tablet; Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1 is 565g, the iPad 2 613g).

However, an Apple rep told me an over-riding consideration was to maintain the iPad 2's 10-hour battery life, even as processing power and the display were up-specc'd.

This obviously involved chunking up the iPad 3 a bit. In my view, it's a worthwide trade-off. Too many smart device makers seem to pay no heed to battery life at all.

THE 4G

For US users, the iPad 3 is about 1. The Retina display and 2. The 4G/LTE mobile data speed. 

Item 2 doesn't apply to NZ at all as Telecom, Vodafone and 2degrees operate 3G networks, and won't upgrade to 4G/LTE until the iPad 4 or iPad 5 is with us.

However - there's some excitement in the Vodafone NZ camp in that the iPad 3 supports dual carrier HSPA+ (HSPA+ being the turbo-charged version of 3G).

Vodafone says it's the only local carrier to support dual carrier HSPA+ and it's promised theoretical maxium speed of 43MBit/s.

That's mouthwatering - but we've yet to see if it'll translate to real-life speeds approaching that kind of velocity (the average DSL landline doesn't often break 10Mbit/s, if that).

I've got a Vodafone Micro-SIM on the way, so it'll be interesting to see (the telco is the official carrier in that if you buy a 4G version of the iPad 3 from Apple's online store, it will arrive with a Vodafone MicroSim; Vodafone also has dedicated iPad data plans. Telecom and 2degrees both sell Micro-SIMs that can be used with an iPad. Apple supplied NBR a review unit with a Telecom Micro-SIM).

So check back early next week for updates.