Almost three years back I posted an entry on Web Workers, coupling it with a Web Worker-enabled derivative of SunSpider. The name was an offhanded derivative of SunSpider, though it unfortunately has a collision with a political slure.

Anyways, I had forgotten about it until a few days ago while looking at a comparison review of the HTC One S and One X on Engadget. Amidst their benchmark results was...moonbat! Since discovered that Anandtech has made use of it as well.

This has been a recurring finding: Tools and entries often seem to find value to someone, somewhere, years later. Pretty cool. Content endures.

Pre-ordered an HTC One X afterwards (EDIT: Since cancelled my pre-order give that Samsung is set to unveil the Galaxy S III just a few days later. I love my GS II so I should wait to give them a shot...and if rumors are true and it comes with the dual-core A15, that would be incredible). Good to see HTC back on top, at least until the Galaxy S III is released.

A Few Clicks to the Front of the Queue

My 3rd generation iPad arrived early Friday morning. I had rushed to hit the buy button right after orders opened, but it turned out that you had about two full days to order and still receive the device on launch day. Apple is quite brilliant at logistics.

Bias

My own wife, surprised that I was ordering, described me as "anti-Apple". Sigh. I am anti-Apple domination. More accurately I am anti-any big corporation domination. It seems like a pretty default position, and I'm truly surprised that anyone could feel otherwise: People actually gloat about enormous Apple, Microsoft or Google profits or influence? If they aren't insiders, that's just sad.

The Screen Leads

The screen on the 3rd gen iPad is simply gorgeous. Considering that the screen is the primary methods of inputs and outputs on a tablet, it's a pretty important attribute, and this does not disappoint. Text looks close to perfect. Photos and websites look stunning, courtesy of both the raw pixel count and the improved colour saturation.

There are observations making the rounds that if you see an iPad 2 and an iPad 3rd generation side by side it is difficult to impossible to tell which is which. Those people must be legally blind. The display is a night and day improvement over the old screen. Text in particular is a work of art.

It isn't a perfect display, however (regardless of how infatuated with Apple DisplayMate might be). Black levels are more like grey levels, with a contrast ratio that is middling at best. After seeing a video on an AMOLED+^2 screen, the new iPad looks underwhelming in comparison, although it leads in every other use.

Speaking of videos, the aspect ratio is suboptimal for video entertainment, with most modern content having substantial black (or rather grey) bars above and below. I have long believed that Apple's original 4:3 aspect ratio was a mistake for many uses — in particular video — and I maintain that position.

It's also possible that the display simply has too many pixels, overloading the system excessively for limited return. Pixel-heavy apps like SketchBook Pro have substantial lag trying to service the screen on the new unit (particularly given that the non-GPU part of the SoC saw no improvement aside from the doubling of RAM).

Because, of course, the Retina branding is, pardon the expression, horseshit, as it was on the iPhone 4 (misunderstandings of competitors and their lack of desire to chase Apple on the PPI meter misses the mark). Apple chose this resolution not because it hit some magical biological threshold, but rather because it was a whole-number multiple of the prior technology-limited resolution due to some short-sightedness in the original platform.

A higher resolution is a benefit, though the return diminishes beyond a certain point . I doubt there is measurably increased utility of this 3.1 million pixel display (compare with the iPad's prior 0.8 million pixels) over the 2.3 million pixels of some upcoming competitors, yet the battery and computation cost still needs to be paid.

Getting Going

The iPad and iPhone that you can buy today are quite evolved from their beginnings. One of the big improvements is the decoupling from a PC. I enjoyed the fact that not once did I have to let this suckle on a PC's teat. Instead the setup was all on the unit itself, as has always been the case with Android devices. Setup was a breeze and I was quickly using the device. It is generally intuitive and responsive.

I discovered multitasking gestures by accident while using Garageband (the one app where I wish it would disable them) and quickly came to depend upon them. That is a very intuitive interface mechanism that is a welcome alternative to hitting the physical home button constantly.

Quirks and Quarks

It isn't perfect, however, which is a bit surprising given some of the narrative about the mythical iOS.

During the setup, as I was quickly jumping through the steps, it kept notifying me how to move icons on the home screen, as if it was committed to making me aware despite the fact that I was much further in the process, busy entering my credit card number for iTunes.

If you set the iTunes password to immediate expiry, many operations will see you forced to enter your iTunes password two or even three times for a simple operation. Either they don't test this setting at all, or they are heavily trying to dissuade against choosing that option.

The browser has inexplicably stalled out a number of times on me despite connectivity otherwise working perfectly. The music browser can access your library on a PC running iTunes (a crashy app that is nonetheless far improved over its infamous past), but it won't even provide the option to access that shared library until you've added at least one track on the iPad itself. A quick Feist purchase later and I could now access my completely unrelated shared library.

I've experienced lagginess and brief stalls in a number of apps. I see them much less frequently than was common in Honeycomb, and still less than in Ice Cream Sandwich, but thought that was interesting.

Options are generally non-existent. You can record surprisingly good quality video but have absolutely no control over the video quality. That is a general philosophy throughout iOS, with fairly typical options being omitted. I think Apple did the right thing: Making the choices for the user leads to a cleaner interface and a simpler implementation, thus with fewer bugs. Competitors should learn from that. Less is often more.

The Good

The overall platform is polished and beautiful. The web browser — greatly improved in more recent iOS outings — is second to none. It really is an incredible browser and I can honestly say that it is probably the best browsing experience across any device, including full-powered PCs. Sites like The Verge somehow offer a much better experience than they do on the desktop.

Garageband is, I believe, the killer iPad app. It is a full-featured demonstration of all of the potential of this platform. There is nothing remotely like it on Android. iMovie is also one of those apps that makes you re-evaluate what is possible on a power-sipping mobile device like this. Virtually all of the Apple apps are stellar.

Many other apps, though, are less impressive. I was primed and ready to dish out to load it up with good apps, but many just aren't worth the trouble. Many of the educational apps seem incredible on first blush but you quickly learn that the App Store is absolutely overloaded with superficial apps hosting lot of flash but absolutely no educational value. Essentially tech demos.

The App Store is a thousand miles wide and an inch deep. Perhaps this is a side effect of the low prices of apps limiting the investment. It is interesting that the $0.99 app marker was set on trivial apps, yet the expectation has remained for complex apps made by teams of devs. After buying what I thought was reams of apps, my iTunes receipt came through and I'd barely passed $50. Somehow I feel like developers are the losers in this equation, a few lottery-winning exceptions notwithstanding.

On the gaming front, Infinity Blade II is the go to iOS game, with impressive visuals for the platform but with gameplay that is incredibly superficial. That game is such a disappointment with lofty reviews that focus overwhelmingly on the visuals. I suppose if I weren't accustomed to incredible PC graphics I would be more entranced by that, but as is it's a game that hasn't held the attention of any member of my family.

My children, I've noticed, have absolutely no inclination to favour the iPad over the Android 4.0 tablet. The apps they enjoy — Angry Birds, Where's My Water, Fruit Ninja HD, Cut the Rope, Netflix, YouTube, and so on — are virtually indistinguishable from their Android counterparts, if not deficient in some ways (unsurprisingly the Google Maps and Google YouTube players in Android 4.0 are far superior to their iOS counterparts).

Conclusion

Having tried to drink in the iPad 3rd generation for a bit, I think I'm a bit surprised that the competition is as close as it really is: The gap has dramatically narrowed. The iPad lacks features that I've come to consider critical on my Android tablet, most important being widgets: I don't want to jump from app to app to app to get information delivery that I have ganged on my home screens.

You can't even set an alarm on the iPad without buying third party apps (all having various warnings and negative reviews about their detriments). Really?

If the Asus Infinity were the same price as this unit, I'd still have to say that the iPad 3rd generation is probably the better choice (unless you heavily use it for videos in which case you have to consider a device with a more appropriate aspect ratio). The iPad is just so refined and has such an excellent web browser that it's a tough champion to unseat.

The competition really has to bring some incredibly compelling benefit, whether something technical or a significantly better price, to upset the iPad. It had looked like the screen was where they would differentiate, but that window has closed and it's going to have to be something else.

The iPad released yesterday (which I pre-ordered) is essentially an upgrade of specs over the iPad 2.

It has a 2048x1538, 40% greater saturation screen serviced by double the GPU cores (2x the performance of the A5, while purportedly 4x the Tegra 3). It has 1GB of RAM and a 5MP, 1080p video capable backlit camera. It has a 44Wh battery — a massive 76% improvement, making me think that the WiFi-only model will feature incredible battery life — and iOS 5.1.

It is a spec bump. A very impressive spec bump that takes the wind out of competitor's sails, but still a spec bump.

So it's odd seeing people like MG Siegler still railing on about how "specs are dead". Specs are very much alive and kicking, and Apple plays that game as hard and as fast as anyone. They lead in the specs department with almost every release, though usually later in the lifecycle, as competitors naturally catch up and surpass them, the various sycophants start the chorus of "specs don't matter". Sure they matter. Specs deliver the goods that allow for the experience.

Managed to run the gauntlet of an overburded web store, successfully submitting my pre-order for the iPad (3rd generation). While the store was crashing during the onslaught of purchasers I tried backdooring to their phone sales only to discover that they, too, rely upon the website for order entry, and were suffering the same outage. That is impressive dogfooding. Back to hitting F5, eventually making it through the order process error free.

This is the first time I've purchased anything from Apple. Ever.

During the Apple II days I had an Atari 400, 800, 800XL, 800XE, Commodore 64 and then 128. During the Mac days I had an Atari ST 512, 1040, 1040 STE, and an Amiga for a time. Then it was onto PCs, from that first Diamond Speedstar 24x equipped 386 that I'd run DJGCC on.

In the smartphone era I've gone through Blackberries, Windows Mobile and Android devices. My tablets have all been Android devices.

Of course I've used Apple devices, playing with IIe's, Macs, iPhones and iPads along the way. Always someone else's, and never enough draw to get one of my own.

The iPad (3rd generation) enticed me enough to put in an order, however.

Firstly there's that screen. Ignoring any marketing branding, at 2048x1536 that is an impressive amount of information displayed on the surface and exceeds even premium laptops. Every pixel represents a discrete output, so conceptually this device has quadruple the information delivery of the prior generation. Given that my primary complaint with prior iterations of the iPad was the low pixel density and resolution, this eliminates that concern.

Secondly there's the A5X. With purportedly double the GPU power it might actually fall behind the iPad 2 in fill-rate limited benchmarks (double the GPU power, but then loading it with four times the pixels, might see it posting seemingly unimpressive numbers, though obviously we'll have to wait and see if they made other architectural improvements to it), but given the considerable lead it still held, it's still very competitive. Debug leaks have the device featuring 1GB of RAM which should give plenty of headroom.

Thirdly, it's available almost immediately. If there's one thing that Apple does right it's announcing products on the cusp of their availability. The Asus Transformer Infinity looks compelling, for instance, but when could I realistically buy one? In a month? Three months? Late summer? Apple's competitors all have a terrible tendency to announce products half a year in advance of availability. Samsung seems to have gotten a clue and is holding off any Galaxy S III talk until it is close to an actual global release.

Fourthly, I want the device to test a web project I've been working on. Obviously I want to provide a first-class experience for iOS users, so I need to test on an iOS device. That also provides a nice excuse to justify a flippant purchase.

Apple is going to sell crazy numbers of this thing. Seriously crazy. Somehow with each pinnacle of revenue it seems like they can't top it, but this release (which only a raving nut could call underwhelming and disappointing. This device is hugely impressive) will keep them on course to being the first trillion dollar company.

EDIT: Forgot to mention another very compelling reason I decided to purchase one: Garageband. I find my Android 4.0 tablet perfect for Netflix, web browsing, information apps like IMDB and Flixster, and even casual gaming, but it lacks anything remotely comparable to Garageband (even if someone tried there are architectural issues in the platform itself that make responsive music applications less than enjoyable). I really do think that is the killer app of iOS.

I'm a pretty big fan of most Microsoft products.

Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 are both leading operating systems in their respective domains: Both are bulletproof, support just about everything and anything, while offering the rare qualities of being both easy to use yet immensely powerful.

IIS 7.5 is superb. SQL Server 2008 R2 is excellent. .NET is a remarkable platform that needn't envy any other.

Over the years I've done a lot of work in the Microsoft stack, and it has been a very powerful partner. Along the way I obtained an MCP, MCSE, and MCDBA (obtained simply to have goal-markers in thoroughly understanding the products. Despite being a developer and software architect, I always want to fully understand the platforms I develop upon to leverage what they had to offer).

I have a BizSpark company. I have an expensive MSDN software subscription.

So please trust that it isn't based upon bias or anti-Microsoft bigotry when I offer up the opinion that Windows 8 is a disaster in the making. That it is a product that will not manage to serve either the tablet or the desktop market competently.

I say this after trying to appreciate the product for a couple of days: The vision just isn't there. The platform is horribly ugly (the overriding design principal of "contrasting color tiles" is tolerated only because it remains novel given how few users of Windows Phone 7 there are), has poor usability, and offers such a split-personality that each simply becomes a grating half-measure.

Microsoft is giving a gift to Apple, voluntarily ceding market to them. They saw what it was accomplishing and tried to reproduce it, poorly.

Windows 8 is akin to KFC switching to Kentucky Fried Beef after seeing McDonald's gaining marketshare. Customers might as well simply buy a Big Mac.

While it is obvious that the traditional desktop is not the center of the computing universe that it once was, and Microsoft should always be attacking new markets, sacrificing the advantages that the desktop platform holds, while gaining little or nothing, serves no one. The desperate attempt to acclimate the desktop base to the mobile and tablet vision will do nothing more than alienate.

Apple should ramp up the manufacturing, as Microsoft is doing a wonderful sales pitch for both iOS and OSX.