Every time Apple drops a new product - particularly when it's a and iPhone or iPad - the inevitable pilgrimage towards those iconic Stores ensues, with consumers willing to withstand lengthy queues in all weathers to get their hands on the Cupertino's next big thing.
When we think and talk about Apple and their products, we generally focus on two key aspects, form and function, both of which make devices like the iPhone, iPod and iPad stand out in the marketplace above all competition. The iPod portable music player revolutionized the way we think about and listen to music. The iPhone was one of the first smartphones to fuse together advanced features with an almost flawless design and the iPad brought about what Apple is calling the "Post-PC" era, and looks set to go from strength to strength.
Although I am relatively still youthful and full of vitality and zest, I am old enough to remember the good old days of yester-year when technology was nowhere near as advanced or feature packed as it is now, but we were still blown away by being able to play block based games on the latest Motorola flip phone or set polyphonic ringtones on our Nokia. I will always remember bounding through the school gates on a Monday morning with my Nokia 3310 in hand, excited about showing classmates the 'Snake' game which came built in with it, feeling a sense of pride that I was one of the few to have a mobile telephone at school.
Some of the most useful applications on the Mac and iOS devices are ones that seem to be simplistic in form, but ultimately end up offering a service or solution to users which can be used time and time again. A lot of people purchase or download an application which offers a one time solution to a problem and then delete it from their machine or device, but the apps which offer a consistent feature set are generally the ones that are used repetitively.
With the public release of the the new iPad drawing ever closer, the gadget and Apple loving population are rightly becoming more excited as the days countdown until they can get their hands on the brand new tablet. Email inboxes around the globe are also starting to receive notifications that Apple have already sent their new shiny iPad out for shipping, prompting speculation that in some case it may even arrive before the March 16th official release date. I received my email this morning saying my two new iPads had been shipped, so fingers crossed that they get here promptly.
Ever since that media event on Wednesday at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, consumers, bloggers, analysts - in fact everybody in and around the greater gadget-sphere has been talking about Apple's "new iPad" with scarcely any relent.
When anyone mentions a touchscreen device, or to be more specific; a touchscreen tablet device, you instinctively think about Apple and the iPad. Ever since the creation of the ground breaking iPhone in 2007, and the subsequent release of the iPad in 2010, touchscreen devices seem to be synonymous with the company. Apple obviously weren't the first technology company to come up with the idea of controlling a mobile device through a touch based interface, but when they entered that segment of the market, they managed to totally reinvent it and almost assume ownership.
During the course of the last year, there has been much speculation circulating Apple's future plans to delve into the fiercely competitive connected TV market, implementing features of its current products to create a purportedly new experience, unofficially dubbed "iTV".
Apple's new Apple TV appears to be the first product to come packed with a single-core A5 chip, according to reports.
The anticipated Apple media event, held in familiar surroundings in San Francisco, has come and gone, and judging by the permanent grid lock on all of Apple's online and telephone sales channels, it looks as if it has left the iPad-loving public very happy indeed. The event brought everything that we had anticipated, throwing very few curveballs and unfortunately lacking the drama of the famous "one more thing" which we had become so used to hearing from the late Steve Jobs.
