The new iPad: ‘The jump from 2 to new isn’t mind blowing’

Oli Newton, head of strategic partnerships at Starcom MediaVest, on why Apple’s latest announcement was a bit of a let down despite all the hype…

I love Apple announcement days – all the hype from the tech blogs, the rumours that have been kicking about for a few weeks and going in to absolute over-drive on the final day and morning.

Will it have this, will it have that? The obsessive tea leaf reading from the invites and then the moment arrives when you have your multiple tabs open covering the various live blogs and audio commentary from tech folk feeding off the updates from their colleagues in the crowd. If you haven’t logged in during one of them, I encourage you to do so, it is a fun and bizarre experience. A hark back to the old days watching football on Ceefax – if that conjures up memories you will love this.

Anyway, my normal routine was messed up with a series of late meetings, so I did complete radio silence, no Twitter or Facebook until the keynote video, all one hour and 25 minutes of it, was made available on the Apple site.

11pm the video is up. I settle down to watch with Apple fan-boy delight.

It’s all about the post-PC world apparently, the acolytes are cheering – not quite Jobsien fervour but still, they have had a lot of sugar. We hear Siri and its various accents from around the world, oh, it also speaks Japanese. Cool.

An updated Apple TV box (not the full TV made by Apple – to be honest, that wasn’t ever really going to be released this soon) offering HD quality film access for the first time and a new interface. I like Apple TV – it works and it is fairly simple to use, so all good.

But what about the iPad? What would it be called? The new, note the lower case, iPad. Where is my iPad 3 or HD?

It has a retina screen, nice. More pixels than an HDTV apparently – how many times will you hear that in the future when anyone shows off their new iPad.

It’s quad-core. Hooray, even faster. It will need it to shift all those new pixels in full-on shininess. It’s got a 1080p camera. Hooray. Hang on, I don’t really care about the camera on the back. People who take pictures with an iPad don’t look cool. All coolness they think the iPad imbues upon them is washed away the moment they hold it up and cock an eye to frame the shot.

Voice activation. Siri, here it comes. Wait! No Siri!?! Lame.

4G and LTE support. Nice and super fast. Shame there are no 4G or LTE carriers in the UK at present… and I don’t genuinely see the reason for having more than Wi-Fi on it anyway – if you really need to connect it outdoors just tether to your phone.

It’s now almost half midnight and I am struggling with this one. It really was a bit of a let down. The jump from 2 to “new” isn’t mind blowing. I’m sure when I see it and play with it I will change my mind, but at the moment I don’t have the traditional post event urge to rush out and splash the cash.

The most exciting thing about it was Tim Cook’s teasing close where he dangled “across the year, you’re going to see a lot more of this kind of innovation”.