The first prediction that was wrong was the availability of the iPad2 for "the rest of you". Apple's tendency is to break down "the rest of you" countries into several sets. Places like UK, France, Germany tend to get the next best treatment. Like for instance being able to buy movies or books for the device. Then comes the next set and the next set, and so on. Finland is way down there, and has been for a long time. Back when the original iPhone was launched, we couldn't buy it here and from what I understand, if you happened to have one in Finland, the service centers woouldn't (and probably still won't) even give you the time of day should you want it fixed, meaning having to mail it back to the US. Finally the iPod touch arrived on the scenes to give us a taste of an iOS device. It took more than 6 weeks after the proposed date of availability before a very small number of 1st gen iPod Touches arrived and were snapped up immediately.
Flash forward a few years to the iPad. What a joke. The iPad is announced and then released in the US only on April 3rd 2010. It next became available to the first tier of "the rest of you": Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom on May 28th 2010. Roll on tier 2 of "the rest of you" Austria, Belgium, Hong Kong, Ireland, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand and Singapore on July 23rd 2010. China got theirs on September 17th 2010. The English wikipedia site doesn't even have the recorded dates of when the iPad went on sale in Finland, but the Finnish wikipedia has the dates. It went on sale here on the 30th November 2010, ladies and gentlemen. That's a few days short of 8 months after it was available in the USA.
The idiotic thing was that a few months after the iPad was announced, Apple announced the iPhone 4. The iPhone 4 went on sale here in Finland just a few weeks or months, it doesn't matter,after becoming available in the USA (it still arrived here way before the iPad). So, effectively all the hype about the iPad not only died, but was buried by the time we got to officially buy one. As evidenced by the articles in all newspapers here about there being not even the faintest sign of queues or even excitement on the release day.
The announcement that "the rest of you" for iPad2 includes Finland and that it should be available just two weeks after the yanks get theirs is a pretty pleasant surprise. Did they finally get rid of the need for the devices to be shipped via camel to Finland? Lets see if the devices actually end up in the shops on March 25th.
My next error in prediction has to do with iPad2 optimized games. Back when the 3GS was announced, many game companies made noise about creating special versions of the games that would utilize the improved hardware. Not much of this really happened for a long time, if ever. However, today I've seen three announcements of games (Infinity Blade, Real Racing 2 and Dead Space) that will support better graphics for the iPad 2. These are available on the release day (US) of the iPad2. This is only a good sign! Hopefully more will follow. I was initially thinking that there would probably not be much reason to upgrade immediately, since we'd have to wait for developers to drag their feet about maybe updating the graphics in their games. This is not the case - people upgrading will get something new straight away.
I'll probably cover some new and interesting wishlists for iOS5 that I've stumbled upon recently in my next article, so tune in soon!
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