The New iPad's Greatest Feature: The Battery

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Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, writing for ZDNet's Hardware 2.0 blog:

While Apple has undoubted put more power efficient technology into its next-generation iPad — for example, dropping the processor architecture down from 40nm to 28 nm would have resulted in quite a significant power saving — the more dramatic improvement has been the battery itself. Between the release of the iPad 2 last year and the announcement of the new iPad yesterday, Apple has nearly doubled the capacity of the battery, taking it from 25Wh to a massive 42Wh. Measured in milliamps this boosts the battery from 6944 mAh to a monstrous 11,666 mAh. Kingsley-Hughes covers much more in this article that I would like to quote here, but when I was trying to decide exactly what to quote, I found that I wanted to quote entirely too much. Just go read his entire article. Done? Good. I've only seen a couple of sites write anything about this and yet, this is one of the major accomplishments that Apple has made with the 3rd generation iPad. Had Apple not been able to make these battery advances, the new Retina display, 4G networking, faster processor…all together would have greatly reduced battery performance. The tech press would have been howling that the new iPad was doomed to failure. And yet, Apple has miraculously increased the battery by so much, without adding a significant amount of weight or altering the case design, that most seemed to not even notice this great improvement. Most wrote it off as am insignificant accomplishment on Apple's part. A shame, I think.

The iPad Is Unbeatable

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Farhad Manjoo, writing for Slate:

Imagine you run a large technology company not named Apple. Let’s say you’re Steve Ballmer, Michael Dell, Meg Whitman, Larry Page, or Intel’s Paul Otellini. How are you feeling today, a day after Apple CEO Tim Cook unveiled the new iPad? Are you discounting the device as just an incremental improvement, the same shiny tablet with a better screen and faster cellular access? Or is it possible you had trouble sleeping last night? Did you toss and turn, worrying that Apple’s new device represents a potential knockout punch, a move that will cement its place as the undisputed leader of the biggest, most disruptive new tech market since the advent of the Web browser? Maybe your last few hours have been even worse than that. Perhaps you’re now paralyzed with confusion, fearful that you might be completely boxed in by the iPad—that there seems no good way to beat it. For your sake, my hypothetical CEO friend, I hope you’re frightened. He hopes, but I doubt it. If they were, they would be restructuring their entire companies in order to compete with this new market. As far as I can tell, they're still in finger-in-their-ears-saying-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-I-can't-hear-you mode.

Why The iPad Has And Will Continue To Dominate The Tablet Market

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Matthew Panzarino, writing for The Next Web:

In a Neilsen survey from earlier this year it was shown that almost no respondents stopped using their smartphones after purchasing a tablet, while 3% completely stopped using their desktop computers and 32% reported that they were using their desktops much less. Consumers treat phones and tablets as separate entities, they look at them as different tools for different purposes. He goes on to discuss many other points, in a well written piece that does a very good job of laying it all out.

Google Forcing Android Developers To Use Google Wallet

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Allstair Barr, writing for Reuters:

Google warned several developers in recent months that if they continued to use other payment methods - such as PayPal, Zong and Boku - their apps would be removed from Android Market, now known as Google Play… Google’s payment service charges a higher cut per transaction than some rivals’. But the move also suggests Google is using its powerful position in the mobile apps market to promote an in-house offering. Marco Arment aptly sums it up: "Open".

The Information Diet: You Are What You Read

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J. A. Ginsburg, writing on TrackerNews:

It is not a pretty picture. And, yes, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), the insidious practice of using keywords to game search results, is driving this race to the inane. The only metric that counts is popularity. “The problem is no one is searching for the Pentagon Papers,” notes Johnson, “No one is searching for high quality investigative reporting.” The next time someone asks me why I dislike SEO, I'm going to direct them to this piece.

We Need To Talk About Android

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Frasier Speirs, an expert on technology used in education, chimed in on a question he gets asked a lot: "What's wrong with Android?":

You're either buying into a platform or you're buying gadgets. The fundamental disconnect between the apparently solid Android engineering that's happening at Google and the actual packaging and deployment that's happening to end-users is turning into a real problem. To my mind, it's a dealbreaker for schools or anyone thinking beyond their next carrier subsidy. I would argue that most, if not all of the points that he lays out in his article, also apply to Enterprise as well.