The Apple iPad 2 Review

FaceTime

by Vivek Gowri

After the iPhone 4 debuted FaceTime last year, Apple has started making every new device FaceTime capable. The iPod touch, MacBook Air and Pro, and now the iPad all can make use of FaceTime to video call other Apple devices.

Apple went with a somewhat disappointing VGA resolution front facing camera on the iPad 2, so video quality isn't great, but overall FaceTime works as advertised. The app itself is pretty similar to the iPhone/iPod touch application, with just three buttons at the bottom while the call is running - mute mic, end call, and switch cameras, in addition to the small window displaying your video stream.

The cool thing though, is that the window with your video around the screen is magnetized to the four corners, and you can flick it across the screen to any of the other three corners. I was FaceTiming with Anand and basically just playing air hockey with a picture of myself without anyone the wiser. It's a neat little detail, one of those UI flairs that makes you appreciate the attention to detail Apple has for its operating systems.

As with the iPhone and iPod touch, FaceTime requires roughly 300 Kbps total bandwidth - 150 Kbps upstream and downstream. Me and Brian both have connections with 3-5 Mbps upstream, in contrast to Anand's 500 Kbps upstream speeds, and the connection between me and Brian was significantly better than between Anand and I, providing a higher quality and less choppy video call.

It worked about as expected, though we did once manage to crash the app when switching between front and rear cameras during a video call. The biggest issue I had with it is that while video quality from the front facing camera, while acceptable on the 3.5" iPhone and iPod touch screens, looks rather poor when scaled up to a 9.7" display. But that's an issue with the actual camera hardware - the FaceTime app itself does the job about as well as one could expect.

How does FaceTime on the iPad 2 compare to Google Video Chat on the Xoom? The experience is pretty similar. Since both tablets rely mostly on the front facing camera for video chat, image quailty is similar. The big advantage the Xoom holds is you can also receive text during your chat if one of the parties is using Gtalk on a Mac/PC.

Photo Booth

by Vivek Gowri

Photo Booth started out as a small application in OS X used to take photos and videos, with a number of after effects and filters that can be applied to customize an image. I basically never ended up using it, even when I was at an easily impressed age, but I know a lot of people who thought it was pretty cool.

Apple has created a version of Photo Booth for the iPad 2, and like the desktop app, it's mostly a gimmick. The really cool part about Photo Booth is that when you first open the app, you're greeted by 9 separate live video streams with the different filters applied to each one. The center video stream is just the normal video feed, then thermal imaging, mirror, x-ray, light tunnel, stretch, twirl, squeeze, and kaleidoscope as the available effects.

Having all 9 video streams displaying at once is a nice way for Apple to showcase the computing power that the A5 has, but also a slick app that Apple can use to show off the possibilities of the iPad form factor. It's not the most useful app in the world, unless you're 13 years old and think that distorted images are cool.