Ipad Evolution

The iPad seems to have been around for a very short time but the idea was probably first mentioned by co-founder Steve Jobs back in 1983 when in a speech on behalf of Apple Inc. when he said “what we want to do is we want to put an incredibly great computer in a book that you can carry around with you and learn how to use in 20 minutes” continuing “and we really want to do it with a radio link so that you don’t have to hook up to anything” and there it was, the iPad idea was born. It was a while before the first tablet came to the market which was the Newton MessagePad 100 and several of those were released up until the MessagePad 2100 which was discontinued in 1998.

Then in 2007 came the predecessor of the iPad, the iPhone with a camera and a touch screen and although there were many rumours about release of a touch pad tablet it was not until 2010 that the iPad was finally launched but was only available through the online Apple store or at their own retail outlets. The original iPad had no camera and of course was not a phone which have been done deliberately to avoid taking sales away from the iPhone but that is only conjecture with the WiFi only versions being launched first followed by the 3G version which was using the AT&T in the US.

The original iPad was by today’s standards a fairly chunky beast being 0.5 inches (12.7mm) thick and weighing in at 1.5 pounds (approx. 700 gm) but it did come in a variety of memory sizes from 16Gb to 64Gb and it had a 9.7in (230mm) screen which has changed very little for the full size versions. Even the battery life where you might have expected some advancement is still more or less the same for current iPads. It was not long before the iPad2 came along to compete with the iPhone having a camera, in fact two cameras but surprisingly only 16Gb of memory but it was thinner and lighter at 1.33 pounds (600 gm). The cameras were pretty good with the rear camera having 720 pixels and a screen resolution of 132 pixels per inch and more importantly it did run faster than the original iPad.

Since the iPad2 there have been a couple more versions with each providing something a little bit better so for example both version 3 and version 4 have screen resolutions of 2048 by 1536 ay 264 pixels per inch and the larger capacity memory has retuned at 64Gb. The cameras have also improved now reaching an astonishing 5 megapixels on the back camera with 1.2 megapixels on the front. In terms of weight the 3rd and 4th generation iPads were fractionally heavier than the iPad2 being very slightly thicker but the next real move came with the release of the iPad mini which is where we really are getting to a cross between an iPhone and a tablet.

The iPad mini maintains the battery life of its larger cousins and surprisingly also the camera quality and the memory capacity but the screen resolution is slightly down at 163 pixels per inch but on a smaller screen it is still pretty amazing. Where the iPad mini really scores is its size and portability weighing only .69 pounds (a little over 300 gm) and measuring only 7.87 x 5.3 in and a little over ¼ in thick giving 7.9 in diagonal.
The idea of the tablet has been picked up by a number of other manufacturers in the meantime and the difference lies in the operating system but you can read more about that on this iPadcasino website.