You're reading: Gadget Guru: Kyiv gets iPads days after big launch, but price bites

No one expected them here so soon, and Apple didn’t even intend to sell them to Ukrainians, but the iPad has already reached Ukraine.

Just days after its launch in the United States on April 3, the latest must-have gadget was available in Kyiv from resellers looking to make a quick buck. The cheapest iPad model, bought for $499 in New York at the start of the week, turned into a $1,200-$1,500 sale in Kyiv a few days later.

Andres Schobel holds up two iPads as one of the first customers to buy an iPad on the first day of Apple iPad sales on April 3 at an Apple Store in San Francisco. Just days after the start of global sales Ukraine got its first shipment of iPads, but its fans have to cough up double the U.S. price. (AP)

The mark-up can be easily explained – the iPad is the most hyped, and many say most revolutionary, gadget created by Apple and its legendary boss Steve Jobs. Analysts predict it will be even more successful than the iconic iPod, iPhone and MacBook.

What Jobs actually did was revitalize an old idea first dreamt up by his rival, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, in 2001. The story of the Tablet PC – a portable computer with a touch screen and without a hardware keyboard – has hardly been one of success. While lots of companies have tried to implement the idea without any results, Jobs seems to have made a breakthrough by using tried and trusted Apple methods – a combination of ultimate style and functionality that meets the performance needs of a vast majority of buyers.

But does it live up to the hype? My first impressions on pulling it out of the box were good – the iPad looks like an iPhone on steroids, and performs like one. A slim, lightweight device with a huge touch screen, it can’t make phone calls, but it’s much better suited to web browsing, playing games, watching videos and other things that benefit from a larger screen.

Jobs was right when he said the iPad perfectly fills the gap between cell phones and notebooks, doing what popular netbooks fail to do. The iPad is more convenient to carry around than notebooks and it provides a better user experience than phones in terms of web browsing or email.

However, there are drawbacks. The iPad has no multitasking, which means that you can run just one application at a time. That’s a severe restriction that neither netbooks, nor notebooks suffer from.

One more flaw is the absence of Flash, a prominent technology used on many web sites. Owners of the iPad will not be able to see parts of many sites or even use some of them at all. Apple says that supporting these technologies would mean reduced battery life. That’s where the iPad blows away its competition. Few other netbooks can touch the 10 hours the iPad gives you before it needs charging.

The lack of a physical keyboard turns out to be less of an annoyance than you’d think. The screen keyboard is pleasant to type on, mostly because of the excellent touch screen that reacts to finger pressures perfectly.

The screen has been promoted by Apple as the best in the industry. It’s certainly ideal for watching videos and looking at photos in vivid colors. But its performance in direct sunlight is quite disappointing, with the picture almost unreadable.

Some users have already complained of problems on the hardware side. Many users noticed that WiFi connection is often lost when other devices maintain a stable connection. During our test of the iPad it often lost connection to a hotspot while a Nokia cell phone and a Samsung notebook were browsing perfectly. Apple still hasn’t publicly acknowledged the problem, while experts say there should be a software fix for the issue in the future. Or else, many users might be very disappointed.

All the more so if they paid $1,500 for it from a huckster in Kyiv. After all, by the end of April the gadget will be sold by almost all online stores, just like the iPhone and all the other gadgets that are not officially shipped to Ukraine. Then the prices will immediately fall to a much more reasonable level, probably just $100-150 more than in the U.S.

You can buy an iPad from

www.appleipad.com.ua

Tel: (380 44) 251-8012

3 Baseyna Street, office 60

iPad 16 gb wifi – $1,200

iPad 32 gb wifi – $1,400

iPad 64 gb wifi – $1,600