Now is a good time to buy an iPad

It's a great time to buy an Apple iPad and there are two reasons for this. The first is that the iPad 2 has just been announce and it will be on sale in a couple of weeks. The second is that the old iPad is being sold off cheaply. So you have the opportunity to buy a top of the range new specification iPad or to save some money and buy the existing model at a cut down price, saving you lots of money. It's rare to get a bargain at the Apple store, but it's one of those occasions right now.

A 16Gb Wi-Fi iPad used to cost £439 in the UK, but in the Apple UK store right now it is just £329. That's a huge saving and let's face it, the original iPad is still a great device. That price point seems just about right and it's a shame it didn't start off at that. Mind you, the high price doesn't seem to have harmed sales. The mobile phone operator Orange is offering the current 3G iPad for just £99 with a two-year contract.

Presumably this is a limited offer that is designed to clear the warehouses of old stock and when they're gone they're gone. It would be surprising if they were still on sale a month from now, so grab one while you can. The new model isn't in the Apple store yet, but the price is likely to be the same as the old one used to be £439 for the bottom of the range model.

The new iPad looks good and the main benefits are that it has front and rear cameras. These are video cameras and they should not be confused with still cameras though. You can take photos with the back camera, but with a resolution of less than 1 megapixel, is it worth it? I've not seen a digital camera with such a low resolution for about 10 years. Where on earth did Apple get it from? It should be fine for shooting video clips though. The only snag is that the iPad is a bit big to use carry around a video camera.

The second benefit of the new iPad is that there is a dual-core processor on board and this will boost the performance. Having two cores does not mean that applications run twice as fast because they tend to run on one core. It does make the system more responsive though because if one core is tied up with a task there's always the other one. I wonder if iMovie and GarageBand, now both on the iPad, are designed to use both cores simultaneously.