I looked at the new iPad in the Apple Store today. The screen is noticeably nicer than my iPad 2's, a bit crisper and brighter (that's probably more saturation). But it wasn't so much better that it made me want to upgrade. It was also noticeably heavier, not dramatically so, but a bit. I didn't notice it being any warmer than mine. So I'm very happy with my decision to get the second generation model.
I'm also kinda happy and surprised to see articles like this one, Video on New Apple iPad Eats Up Monthly Data Plans "Brandon Wells got the new iPad last Friday, started wirelessly streaming March Madness games the next day and by Saturday night was out of gas. Two hours of college basketball—which he viewed mounted to his car dashboard and live at tournament games—had burned through his monthly wireless data allotment of two gigabytes."
As soon as I heard the max of LTE was 72Mbps I was thinking about the math and you go through 2GB in under 4 minutes. So two hours isn't bad. But I'm surprised people really didn't realize this. And was Mr. Wells watching college basketball on his dashboard mounted iPad while driving?
And I don't understand this in the article, "What many consumers may not realize is the new iPad's faster LTE connection means they will use more data even if they don't change their 3G surfing habits. Take regular video: Verizon estimates that streaming it over an LTE connection runs through 650 megabytes an hour. That's double the amount of data used streaming the same video over a 3G link, because the fatter pipe lets more data through."
Isn't SD video the same amount of data regardless of how quickly it's sent? Are they talking about different qualities of SD? Are the sources compressing it differently depending on the connection and then can't they just compress it further on LTE (or is it a scam to use more data)?
2 comments:
I'm surprised it is not warmer, although that may just be a function of what you were doing with it.
My guess as to the comment about using more bandwidth for the same video is that "3G" link is actually dropping frames so you get less than SD whereas LTE doesn't have to. Although it is not impossible the carriers are padding content to raise usage.
Clearly they need a new pricing model. The extra bandwidth of LTE is cheaper for the carriers. It's plain greed if they keep that all as profit.
All that aside, there is (or will be) a real gain from LTE even if you maintain your same data usage. The added system bandwidth will support more users, so you are less likely to get bumped or degraded once it gets crowded.
You're right, since they later mentioned HD I took "regular video" as SD.
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