Craving resolution

I'm not sure I really needed an excuse to upgrade to the new iPad but, as I expected, the high-resolution display has provided me with one.

Apart from making all apps that little bit crisper, I have experienced some real gains:

• Books are now so much more readable that I am no longer going to bother taking my Kindle with me when I go away, but will rely on the iPad Kindle app instead.
• Magazines in the newsstand are now as readable as their print equivalents and I'm not now expecting to renew any of my hard copy magazine subscriptions. In fact I will undoubtedly read more magazines than ever before, as many now include audio and video.
• Web browsing is as clear as on any desktop.
• And then there's Adobe Photoshop Touch; at $6.99, less than 1% the price of the Extended Mac/PC version, yet absolutely magical to use. Given that the new iPad's resolution is 2048x1536, which is exactly the same number of pixels as my 2560x1440 27" iMac, there's no reason why the feature list shouldn't be enhanced enormously in future (although the iPad would need a faster processor and much more memory for the two to be genuinely equivalent). Anyway, there are plenty of features already - see the blurb.

For many the new iPad will be a perfectly acceptable laptop replacement. It still isn't quite that for me, but there will be plenty more occasions now when I'll leave the laptop at home.