I recently returned from a 10 day vacation, on this vacation I only brought my iPad and my iPhone with me. Normally when I go out of town I usually bring my Macbook or Macbook Air with me and connect to hotel Wi-Fi or free Wi-Fi hotspots if I can find one. For this trip though I brought only my iPad and paid the $30 fee to AT&T and used the cellular data on my iPad, this was also the first time I got to experience LTE and not just the '4G' data on my iPad. I also saw a ton of people with iPad's at Disney. Actually. At. Disney. Taking pictures with the iPad, browsing with the iPad, using the Disney line apps on the iPad, using the Disney map on the iPad basically using the iPad like a mobile device and not a laptop replacement. But, that is a story for another day.
My first experience with LTE was a terrific experience. The first time I saw LTE appear on my iPad was around D.C. but I think I was actually in Virgina on I-95 South toward Florida. I didn't have LTE service for that long maybe about 15 minutes and LTE went away a did not appear again until I was outside of Jacksonville, FL. After Jacksonville I think I had LTE the rest of the time I was in Florida, keep in mind that I am on AT&T so I am not sure if Verizon has better coverage, I think they do. I will say that while I was in Florida it seemed I never had less than 2 bars of LTE though. Those 2 bars felt faster than my home internet which is powered (or underpowered) by Comcast. It felt awesome using my iPad on LTE, nothing lagged, webpages loaded fast and it felt like I was at home sitting on my couch. My overall service with AT&T was pretty good I think out of my entire trip I was only without cellular data only once for an extended amount of time and that was for about a 30 minute stretch of south Georgia on I-95. I would say from New England to Florida I only went without service maybe 3 times and never for more than a few minutes with the exception of that stretch in Georgia. I don't think my battery drained that much faster on the LTE vs. my normal usage which is on Wi-Fi. If the battery did drain faster than normal it was not noticeable.
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The LTE model iPad paid for itself. The Disney resort I stayed at wanted to charge me $9.95 a day for internet access, $9.95 x 7 days = $69.65. Of course I still had to pay AT&T the $30 but that was for a month of service which is about a $1 a day. I still have 4G cellular data on my iPad as of right now even though I probably will not use it since I am home and will probably just connect via Wi-Fi. I do travel a lot so having cellular data on my iPad when I normally would not have Wi-Fi available is a nice added feature to an already terrific device!
I did run into a few annoyances with a data only iPad, in other words no Wi-Fi access. PhotoStream was my biggest problem, it wasn't really a problem as I know that my photos only sync over Wi-Fi but until you go an extended amount of time without Wi-Fi service you will then begin to see how valuable Wi-Fi + PhotoStream is. For those that do not know what PhotoStream is, it is Apple's photo sync service through iCloud which sends your photos taken with your iPhone or iPad camera to your other iOS or OS X devices using the same Apple ID via iCloud that have PhotoStream turned-on. Since I was on vacation and using my iPhone to take a ton of pictures (1337 to be exact) I really missed not having PhotoStream sync my pictures from my iPhone to my iPad. I could still sync my photos but that required a USB cable and the camera connection kit plus about 10 minutes of my time. Another thing that bugged me was trying to either download a new app or update applications that I already had installed on my iPad. I ran into this problem a couple of times, on a data connection you can not do either if the file size is above 50MB. Seemed like everything I wanted to do was over this 50MB cap which really irked me to no end. I guess I can look at it on the bright side, it beat the 35MB limit that it used to be.
The main reason for this post is, if you are thinking of buying an iPad and not sure if the LTE model is right for you, I would say if you live in an area with LTE go ahead and spend the extra $129 and get the iPad with LTE. If you do not live in an area with LTE but you travel a lot or if live in a city where LTE might be coming soon getting the LTE model iPad is probably a good investment. Even though I only got to use LTE for about a week in that 1 week it made me glad I choose to go with the LTE model. A few annoyances aside my overall experience was a good one.
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