The new iPad and our seven pet peeves

Apple’s big iPad announcement has just finished, with almost all plausible rumours circulating over the past few months proven to be true.

Overall, it looks like another stellar product launch from Apple. However, we’ve got seven pet peeves we need to write down. Do you agree with any or all of these?

Battery life

The iPad 2 had a battery life of 10 hours “for most things you do”. The new iPad still has a battery life of 10 hours. While 10 hours is still fairly impressive, nine hours on 3G/4G, a lot of Apple users, including us, wanted to see an improvement on this.

Price

As with battery life, the price of the new iPad remains unchanged. The new WiFi-only 16GB model costs $499 and stretches to $829 for the new WiFi + 4G model with 64GB of storage – both prices matching that of the iPad 2 on launch. The iPad 2 lives on in 16GB form only, now priced at $399 for WiFi-only and $529 for WiFi +3G.

Storage

There’s no 128GB model yet. The new iPad shoots 1080p video, takes images at a resolution of 5-megapixels and supports 4G LTE with download speeds of up to 73 Mbps – we can see 64GB of space being exhausted in no time.

Heavier and thicker

The new iPad weighs slightly heavier than the iPad 2 – 1.4lbs versus 1.3lbs. It’s also 0.6mm thicker at 9.4mm. We’d prefer if these metrics were going the other direction.

No Siri

The new iPad doesn’t have Siri. It does, however, come with voice diction, meaning you can input text using speech – but it’s no Siri. Voice diction currently support English, French, German and Japanese.

Camera

The camera in the new iPad is only 5-megapixel, which seems disappointing since the iPhone 4S has boasted an 8-megapixel one for some time. That said, the new iPad camera does come with auto-exposure, auto-focus and face detection – all things the iPad 2’s camera lacks.

It’s not called the iPad 3 or iPad HD

Rather confusingly, the new iPad is referred to as the ‘new iPad’. It’s not the iPad 3 as some suspected (not us) or the iPad HD (us). It’s also distinct from the iPad 2. Do we have to keep calling it the new iPad until the iPad 3 gets released next March? It is fair to call it the third-generation iPad, though.