Don't fret if you didn't camp out at the Apple store over the weekend to nab an iPad 2 before the much-hyped tablet sold out. While great praise has been heaped upon Apple's newest gadget, it's not without its faults. Here are four things bloggers and tech critics are griping about:
1. Light leaks
Some users have noted issues with light leaking around the edges of the tablet's display, creating a band of light around the screen's perimeter that fades toward the center of the device. Others have observed patchy yellow discoloration, which could be related to the light leak problem. "From the look of various support and community forums, neither of these issues is widespread," says Josh Lowensohn at CNET. But, with the tablet having just gone on sale, "it's too early to make that call."
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2. Mediocre screen
Tech followers had high hopes that the new iPad 2 would have the same ultrahigh-resolution retina screen as the iPhone 4. No dice. The failure to improve upon the original iPad's screen in some way is "a literally glaring omission," says Stewart Wolpin at Techlicious. "Amazon has made and will continue to make marketing hay over iPad's poor performance in daylight relative to the Kindle, which the iPad 2 doesn't improve upon."
3. Lackluster tech specs
Yes, the "iPad 2 just seriously raised the bar on sleek, sexy computer hardware," says Joshua Topolsky at Engadget, but its tech specs are lacking. The iPad 2 has 512MB of RAM, but I think "a device in this class should probably be sporting 1GB." In many ways, the new specs are just more of the same. "There's nothing here that is totally mind-blowing."
4. Bad camera
"Apple didn't do us any favors with cameras on the iPad 2," says Wolpin. Unlike the beautiful 5-megapixel HDR camera on the latest iPhones, the iPad 2 cameras both have less than 1 megapixel, making for dull, grainy shots. They're "really pretty bad" cameras, says Topolsky.
