-What's up?
I'm Brian Tong and welcome to the Apple Byte and this week, it's all about the iPad 2.
Steve Jobs made a surprise appearance to a standing ovation to announce Apple's latest tablet.
-Good morning.
Thanks for coming.
Thank you.
Thank you.
-Wow.
That was emotional.
So, let's just show you the goodies with Donald Bell's hands-on with the iPad, our review.
-Hey, I'm Donald Bell for CNET.com.
I'm here at Apple's iPad 2 launch event and I'm holding the iPad 2.
In fact, I'm holding the white version of the iPad 2.
There's now 2 colors, a white version and a black version.
All the same prices, all the same capacities as last year's but you're now getting much thinner design, a lighter design, and you're also getting a faster processor.
There's a dual-core A5 processor in here that's promising 9 times the graphics performance of the original iPad.
You're also getting a few new features.
You're getting a FaceTime feature for video calling, you get HD cameras on the back and a VGA camera on the front.
Apple's also announcing two new applications for the iPad, their own applications,
one's iMovie for the iPad which was available before on the iPhone and the iPod Touch.
It's now coming to the iPad and it's the most sophisticated version, or at least the most sophisticated mobile version of iMovie we've seen yet.
The other application that Apple announced today for the iPad is GarageBand.
This is gonna be a pretty cool application out there for you musical types.
It does multitrack recording, virtual instruments, a lot of fun.
We're gonna see this thing March 11th, so having played around with the iPad 2 the little bit that I've had here, I have to say the thing I like about it the most is how thin and light Apple's been able to get the design.
I've been seeing a lot of their competitors this past year, I haven't seen anything that's gotten this small and I think being able to preserve that 10-hour battery life is a big deal.
It's gonna be hard to be able to keep up with that so for CNET.com, I'm Donald Bell showing off the Apple iPad 2.
-Amazing.
Now, let's be real.
There are plenty things that many of you aren't happy about.
It still has no Flash support, the screen is the same resolution, there's no SD card slot, the cameras are for video and not stills,
and you have to pay for an adaptor to get HDMI out.
It's a dual-core tablet with 10 hours of battery life and it's thinner than the iPhone 4 so, yeah, I'm getting one.
Now, it'll be available in the US on March 11th.
There are no pre-orders so expect lines and also expect that same guy who sleeps overnight to be the first in line at every launch to be there, too.
But forget about the iPad 2, the coolest announcement by far was Apple's Smart Cover.
The thing offers no protection whatsoever except for a thin piece of material that covers your screen
and it automatically aligns itself with magnets.
It wakes the iPad when you remove it and puts it to sleep when you put it on.
It folds and rolls into a stand both horizontally and vertically.
This thing does more than my last girlfriend, and I want one, the red leather one because you know how we like leather.
Alright, let's take a little break for our iPhone App of the Week.
This week's iPhone App of the Week is Tiny Wings.
It's 99 cents and, no, this isn't an Angry Birds rip-off even if, you know, the birds look exactly the same,
but all you have to do is touch the screen to fold your wings to make yourself heavy and gain speed going downhill, let go to fly and it's the classic, simple, cute, and addictive game.
Looks like Ariel.
Alright, to the Quick Bytes.
iOS 4.3 was briefly featured and you've seen it on our show.
It will be released to the public on March 11th with support for the iPhone 4 GSM model, the 3GS, and the third and fourth-gen iPod Touches, but not the Verizon iPhone 4 at the moment.
Also, iMovie and GarageBand were two apps that I'm genuinely excited about and they make the iPad now a device that's not only for content consumption but content creation.
They'll be $4.99 for each app.
The universal version of iMovie for iOS devices will work on the iPad 2, iPhone 4, and the fourth-gen Touch but not the original iPad while GarageBand will work on both iPads.
Now, I know there's some of you that aren't impressed by this iPad update, but for those you looking for a sweet deal, check out the refurbished section of Apple's online store where you can now get the original 0G 16-gig iPad
that's good as new with the same warranty for $349, so, yeah, you might wanna get on that.
Alright, that's gonna do it for this week's show.
Now, we wanna hear how you, the Apple Byters, feel about the iPad 2.
I'll read your e-mails on next week's show so send us your thoughts to the applebyte@cnet.com <mailto:applebyte@cnet.com>.
I'm Brian Tong, thanks for watching, and we'll catch you guys next week for another Byte of the Apple.
