Last month, President Obama almost smacked some goofus upside the head for insinuating he couldn’t get an iPad. “I’m the President of the United States. You think I’ve got a – you think I’ve got to go borrow somebody’s computer?” he said.
It was a perfect little moment of presidential sass, and the only way it could have been more perfect is if Obama had called his interlocutor a jive turkey before actually smashing him over the head with his iPad. However, questions abounded, including what flavor of iPad Obama favored: a first-gen model or the iPad 2?
Well, here’s your answer, courtesy of the White House’s Flickr account. The president owns an iPad 2 and what appears to be an unassuming gray polyurethane smart cover… a wise choice on the President’s part, given how prone to picking up Marmite and beer stains the leather covers are.
But one great, eternal question remains: does the president use the iPad 2 WiFi-only model, or the iPad 2 3G? Update: As a reader points out, it’s an iPad 2 3G!
[via TUAW]
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
14 responses to “Proof: President Obama Uses An iPad 2 3G”
Someone is not doing his homework. The President is using an iPad 2 3G. There as another photo published a few weeks ago showing the back of the iPad. It clearly had the 3G antenna.
Ipad 2 3G http://www.flickr.com/photos/w…
Thanks, guys! Updated!
What I would like to know, and I can’t imagine I’m the only one:
1. How has the device been ‘hardened’ for Presidential use? No way the people in charge of information security at the top-level would allow President Obama to use it out-of-the-box.
2. Special apps? That bypass the App Store? I’m sure the government would be able to get Apple to let them bypass the app store.
3. Wireless? I can not imagine, even for a second, that the NSA would allow that device to transmit over a wireless carrier – unless it’s carrying some serious encryption at the device level… which leads into encryption in general: software-based? Additional hardware-based encryption? I have no doubts as to the chops of the gadget guys in the NSA being able to split one open, build a custom board of some sort that provides hardware encryption… without altering the external appearance of the device… maybe a marginally smaller battery?
Sadly, we’ll never know… :(
I had no doubt in my mind about this given the meetings between Obama and Jobs.
Black or White?
I would guess white by the smart cover.
http://mobilearmor.com/ Yup, its DataArmor.