Blog

Holy stopmotion action, Batman! When LEGO sent us some of its amazing DC Superheroes sets, we’re not ashamed to say we got very excited. You can shoot these figurines and props frame-by-frame in LEGO's own Super Heroes Movie Maker app, and with a bit of time and patience you can make some epic stop-motion adventures!

And so, I was locked (ahem, ushered) into a brightly lit cupboard in Tap! Towers, armed with nothing but an iPhone and a tripod, and challenged to attempt to trump Christopher Nolan’s upcoming summer blockbuster – albeit one small frame at a time...

Robert Llewellyn is best known for his loveable, bumbling portrayal as the robot Kryton in classic BBC sit-com Red Dwarf and for presenting popular TV show Scrapheap Challenge. He also has a podcast called Fully Charged. Robert loves his iPhone – even though he struggles to get network signal at home!

01 Calendar For the first time in my life I have one diary which is always up to date. I still get confused and I still stuff up, but that’s because I’m an idiot with access to the latest technology.

02 Flashlight Although it’s the most naff app around, I do actually use it quite regularly.

03 Maps When I’m working in London, I always try and walk everywhere. There have been many occasions when I think I know where I’m going; when confusion kicks in, I check my location on the map app. Utterly transforming tech. 

04 Twitter I am almost embarrassed to admit this is probably the most used app I have. 23,633 tweets, I just checked. Lordy. But I have been on Twitter since the very start...

05 TwitVid I do use this app quite often – shoot a little vid then zoosh it off. Nice. I also like Qik Video; again, not a heavy user, but every now and then.

Originally printed in February 2011

To find out how other famous faces use their iOS devices, and for more great features and tips, don’t miss an issue of Tap!

iOS 6 is packed with some brilliant headline features, such as turn-by-turn navigation in the revamped Maps app, Passbook for managing tickets, vouchers and loyalty cards, and a smarter Siri that will also make its debut onto iPad. You can find out about all these and more on Apple’s website.

But for us, and as always, the things we’re really looking forward to are the tiny improvements and flashes of genius that make using iOS devices such a joy. And so here are our favourite little features that we know are coming to iOS 6 that you might have missed.

Unified phone number and Apple ID
Matt was watching the keynote on his iPad while also watching the England-France game in Euro 2012; when news that Apple is unifying your phone number and Apple ID broke, his ‘Yesss!’ fist-pump made Tom think England had scored. Why was he so excited? It means not only that people can FaceTime you on your phone-number-less iPad or Mac by punching in your phone number, but that iMessages sent specifically to your phone number also appear on your other Apple devices – rather than just popping up only on your phone.

FaceTime over 3G
And, joy of joys, FaceTime now works over the mobile data network. At the moment, it requires Wi-Fi, which is obviously annoying if you want to brag to your colleagues that you’re sitting on a beach sipping sangría – or if you’re a nicer person and just want to call up your parents to let them see their granddaughter on the swings at the park. Now that FaceTime works over cellular networks – likely to be limited to 3G and 4G – taunting and tumbling tots can be shared over a video chat from anywhere you can get a good mobile signal.

Lost Mode
Find My iPhone is a great service for tracking your lost iOS devices, sending messages to them or even wiping them clean in case you worry about sensitive data falling into the wrong hands. It gets even better with iOS 6. Now if you lose your phone, you can ping it with an alternative number – your spouse’s, say, or your office phone number – and when someone finds your phone, they just have to tap a button to be connected straight to you. No longer do you have to rely on people rifling through your Contacts.

Better Reminders
Reminders gets some welcome improvements in iOS 6. Not only will you be able to set location-based reminders on iPad as well as iPhone, but you can also both set those locations manually, and manually reorder items in the list.

Being able to define those geofences – the areas that will trigger alerts when you enter of leave them – by hand is great, because currently you have to pick an address from your Contacts list, which can be irritating.

Guided Access
There’s some really cool stuff here. On the one hand, Guided Access lets you lock down bits of apps – buttons that can configure the app, say – so that kids or people on the autistic spectrum who can benefit from a distraction-free, guided experience can use an app on their own without the danger that they’ll mess things up or get frustrated.

Guided Access also lets you do things like suppress the Home button, so people can’t quit the app. (It’s easy to securely deactivate Guided Access though.)

This is a boon for, say, museums who want to use iOS devices for guide apps, or for schools who might want to use iOS devices for tests.

Quickly tweet and update Facebook
Love to tweet or update your Facebook status? With iOS 6 it’ll be even quicker; there are buttons for Twitter and Facebook right on Notification Center, so all you have to do is swipe your finger down from the top of the screen and tap a button. It’s never been easier to tell your friends what you had for lunch!

Facebook contacts and calendars
Facebook is actually integrated much more deeply into the system as well. Not only can you share photos, links and more like you can with Twitter in iOS 5, but you can integrate your Facebook Events and friends’ birthdays into Calendar, and sync your Facebook friends list with Contacts. Plus, you can Like apps in the redesigned App Stores.

International Siri
Finally, the full Siri experience will make it outside the US. Not only is there support for a wider range of languages – including localised versions of Spanish and both Mandarin and Cantonese – but it also launches local search for more countries than just America, including the UK.

Insert photos into emails
Finally, you can now attach photos and videos to emails after you’ve started writing them. Yes, we’d still like the option of attaching any document rather than just photos and videos, but without a file system (and we understand the reasons for not exposing a file system to users) this is a tricky proposition.

App linking from Safari
Admittedly, people like us are more excited about this than most normal human beings, but we really are excited here. The idea is that if you have made an app and have a website – such as tapmag.co.uk and the app edition of our magazine – you can trigger a banner as soon as someone comes to your website that tells them about the app and optionally takes them straight to the App Store. If they already have it installed, it knows this and instead offers to open that app, in some cases at the the equivalent point they're viewing the website. It’s going to be a great way of discovering some great apps as you browse around the web.

There are 3,145,728 reasons to love the new iPad – but there are a few reasons to find it disappointing

Show the new iPad to someone who loves technology, and they’ll immediately fall in love with the new screen.

They’ll appreciate what an astonishing technical feat Apple has pulled off in cramming no fewer than 3,145,728 pixels into a screen 9.7″ across. They’ll quote Apple’s line about it having a million more pixels than a Full HD TV. They’ll remind you that the screen is so detailed, developers creating apps for it have a problem: nobody really makes a computer screen big enough enough to show the iPad Simulator at 100% in both orientations without rotating the screen.

They’ll heft it in one hand and say that while they can just about tell that it’s around 50g heavier and 0.6mm thicker than the iPad 2, it’s still an astonishingly slim, light device that feels beautifully made. And that it is, in any case, slimmer and lighter than the original iPad.

They’ll marvel at the fact that even though the mobile internet model has the notoriously power-hungry LTE 4G networking, it still matches the iPad 2’s legendary battery life: 10 hours browsing the web on Wi-Fi, nine hours on mobile internet. If they’re really geeky, they’ll tell you that Apple pushed the battery capacity from 25Wh to 42.5Wh from the iPad 2 – an amazing jump, considering that the difference in weight and thickness is so small.

They’ll ask you if you have Sky Gamblers: Air Supremacy on there, so they can see a game that takes advantage of the improved graphics processor in the new A5X chip.

They’ll leave feeling jealous, and wanting to buy one.

However.

If you show the new iPad to someone who has only a passing interest in technology, they’ll look at it politely, tell you it seems very nice, and hand it back while wondering why you’re so delighted with this iPad that, as far as they’re concerned, seems identical to the last one you proudly showed them a year ago.

Four times the pixels, a hundred times the awesome
As far as we’re concerned, though, that pixel-packed Retina display alone is reason enough not just to buy this as your first iPad, but to consider upgrading from an iPad 1 or 2. (Even if you have one of the two older models and think you don’t need or want the higher resolution, as soon as you spend 10 minutes with the new one and then blithely pick up your old one, it suddenly looks second-rate; it’s not as dramatic a difference as when you went back to VHS after first seeing a DVD, but it’s that sort of change.) Let’s talk about why.

Not only are the colours bright and rich with essentially no colour cast, but it’s such a dense grid of pixels (the coloured dots that make up the image) that when held at a natural distance away from your face, you can’t see the individual pixels that make up the pictures and text on the screen; everything looks perfectly crisp.

The pixels aren’t packed in quite as tightly as on the iPhone 4 and 4S – while the original iPad had a density of 132 pixels per inch (ppi), and the iPhone 4 and 4S have 326ppi, the new iPad is 264ppi – so if you squint closely at the new iPad, you will be able to spot them, but you really can’t in normal use.

It’s not just the level of detail that improves, but because the pixels are packed so much more closely in the new iPad than in previous ones, areas of solid colour look incredibly smooth and uniform; you don’t think you notice the tiny gaps between the pixels on the older, non-Retina iPads, but we think they act sub-consciously as a flag that you’re looking at a computer screen.

You might think that all sounds silly – solid colours look pretty solid on the older models, right? – but when you put them side-by side, keen eyes really notice the difference. One effect of this is that reading, say, plain black text on a white background feels, sometimes disconcertingly, like you are reading a printed page rather than looking at a computer screen. There is a very subtle but oddly affecting feeling that you’re directly interacting with flat, inert objects rather than abstracts locked away inside a computer.

Reading on the new iPad is an especially lovely experience now, and, presumably because of the more densely packed pixels making it harder for the backlight to shine through, its dimmest setting is less bright than the iPad 2’s – which actually makes it great for using at night in a pitch black room.

Better, stronger, faster?
The screen’s not the only thing that has improved, though. There’s a new processing chip powering it: the A5X. We maintain that even the original iPad never really felt slow in the same way an underpowered PC or Mac does, so this new processor doesn’t as such make the iPad feel much faster as you swipe around or even launch apps, but the boosted graphics performance will mean even more realistic and visually stunning games in the future. Spend some time comparing a game such as Sky Gamblers: Air Supremacy – which can take advantage of the A5X – running side-by-side on the iPad 2 and the new iPad, and there’s no doubt that the experience on the new iPad is noticeably richer, but don’t buy the new iPad thinking you’ll see a boost in graphics comparable to the jump from PlayStation 2 to PS3.

The camera, though, is a big upgrade. At least, the rear camera is; the camera on the front for FaceTime, Skype and the like is still the same mushy low-res affair that it always was, and it still suffers from pointing a little off to the side when you use it in landscape as shown in Apple’s marketing materials.

The rear camera, though, is hugely improved. It’s not just that it’s higher resolution – five megapixels, up from less than one, and capable of shooting 1080p rather than 720p video – but that its construction and sensor help it to take far cleaner pictures than before, with colours that are brighter and more accurate. There’s still noise in low lighting, mind you.

The other big news with the new iPad is 4G, the faster successor to the 3G mobile internet network we use now. At least, it’s big news in the US, where they have a 4G infrastructure. 4G doesn’t exist in the UK yet outside a couple of trial areas, and it’s not clear when it will come – the government will auction the wireless spectrum as it did with 3G, and that keeps getting delayed. Happily, the 4G model works fine with 3G networks too – but it’s unlikely that the current model will work with whatever flavour of 4G we end up getting in the UK. Don’t, in other words, buy this particular model in the UK thinking you’ll get faster-than-3G broadband, now or in the future.

In the US, having the 4G connection is a boon, and tests by AnandTech have shown that, if you don’t use it for anything else, the new iPad on Verizon can act as a Personal Hotspot (sharing its internet connection over Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or USB – something iPads couldn’t do before) for over 24 hours – which demonstrates impressive battery life.

It cannae do it, cap’n; it just disnae have the power
That hugely capacious battery and the amount of power the iPad draws are a problem, though. If you have it connected to a PC or Mac over USB, it’s possible that the iPad can be using more power than the computer can provide, so even when connected, the battery can be running down. And we didn’t just find this when connected over USB – in some circumstances, we’ve seen the iPad run down very slowly even when connected to the mains.

And even with the iPad plugged into the wall and asleep, we found ourselves occasionally struggling to top the battery up, and eventually started charging it overnight to feel confident we’d have plenty of juice the next day. Overall, the iPad’s battery life remains excellent, but for the first time, we’ve started to keep an eye on the battery meter, which does tarnish the magic of the iPad just a little.

The new iPad is a really tough thing to sum up. On one hand, it has everything that its two older siblings had, and nobody really needs convincing that any iPad is a delightful, useful, quietly astonishing device. On the other hand, we think it’s the first generation where the compromises that Apple has to make with the current technology have become subtly apparent; the A5X processor needs a lot of power, which leads to the compromises we described with the battery and is likely to be why the bottom-left corner of the iPad gets warm in use – though not hot, and not as warm as a charging iPhone 4S can. (Matt’s post at tapm.ag/notonewipad explains how we anticipate Apple solving this with the next iPad.)

But if you’ll allow us a third hand, that screen really is the most beautiful you’re likely to have seen – with better colour, tonal range and, of course, detail than pretty much any screen ever made.

We’ll still buy one, and we’ll still love it to bits. But for the first time, there’ll be a nagging doubt that this is the model we should skip – roll on the new new iPad next year.

Get the Tap! app edition, packed with authoritative reviews of the best of the App Store and more to help you get the most from your iOS device!
Our rich, interactive iPad edition is actually made every month using an iOS app we built ourselves – made on an iPad, for an iPad, about iPads, iPhones and iPod touches!

Click to get the best price on a new iPad today!