As some of you may have already noticed, iPad Insight has a fresh new look today.  The site’s design hadn’t changed in a number of years and it was time for a refresh.

The new theme we’ve chosen highlights more featured posts, consolidates our site logo and navigation bar areas, and works beautifully on the iPad and mobile devices in general (as you’ll see any time you switch to the desktop theme on your devices). It also offers a cleaner look all round.

We’ve only just made the final theme changeover late last night – so please bear with us as we iron out some kinks with it over the next few days.

I hope you’ll like the new theme and that it will help you to continue enjoying our insight on all things iPad.

Long overdue, but also hopefully better late than never, here’s our lucky winner of a new iPad Air 2 – given away as part of marking the 5 year anniversary of this site. Apologies for the delay in announcing this – I was down with flu-like nastiness this week

Faisal Alnwimy

Congratulations Faisal and please keep an eye on your Inbox and spam folders – as I’ll be emailing you very soon to ask for your shipping address to send that iPad to.

Thanks to all of you who commented on the post – there were lots of excellent comments and many that are helpful and useful in terms of what you’d like to see more of and where you’d like to see us improve.

5 years of iPad Insight

On January 27, 2010 Steve Jobs announced the original iPad. On January 29, the first post on this site was published – there’s a snippet of it in the image above.

Wow. There’s that saying about how time flies when you’re having fun. I guess I’ve had way too much fun then, because these 5 years have flown by. I was fascinated by the iPad right from the start, and had a feeling it might be my ideal mobile device – and I was already a big-time mobile geek. It lived up to and exceeded all my expectations –  and I’ve enjoyed the heck out of using it, singing its praises and showing off its magic to family, friends, work colleagues, and anyone who would allow me to in person. Needless to say, writing about it here on a daily basis has been a great, great pleasure.

Over the years, I’ve posted quite a few times on ‘Crazy iPad Numbers’ – units sold, market share dominance, and more. Today I’ll share some crazy iPad Insight numbers racked up over these first 5 years:

— Over 5,000 posts

— Over 13,000 comments – and nearly 1.5 million spam comments blocked (yuck)

— Over 28 million page views

— 44% of visitor sessions from the iOS operating system coming in as Number 1 by some distance – followed by Windows as the second biggest, and we even have 2.35% from Android OS

— 50.58% of visitors from the US – I love that right about half have been from outside the US

— Male 54.5% – it’s good to see a fairly decent balance on this demographic too

— We’re a featured site on Flipboard and average close to 100,000 monthly active users there

— Our Google+ site page has had over 20 million views

Ok, enough of those. As a small gesture to try to express BIG gratitude to all of you who are iPad Insight readers – we’ll giveaway a new iPad Air 2 next Monday, February 2. Hit the break for details on how to enter for a chance to win that …

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So it looks as if we’ve got a bit of a job opening here at iPad Insight. Well, a volunteer job anyway – ideally suited for somebody who loves iPad games and loves telling other people about the games they love.

As in, we’d love to find one or two volunteer game reviewers to cover iPad games here. Although this is an unpaid gig, it does have a few notable perks: promo codes for games you review and a chance to build up your reviewing profile on a well-known and respected site for starters.

Here’s the sort of traits we’re looking for in the person or persons who will help us broaden our coverage of iPad games:

— The Obvious: passionate about gaming, and mobile gaming, iPad gaming in particular.

— Gift of the Gab: strong writing skills and perhaps a flair for video reviews too. Some online writing experience is also something we’d like to see.

— Fundamentals: you have to be solid on grammar – no YouTube comments level writing styles accepted.

— Happy to work with our small team here.

That’s about it. If it sounds like you’re a great fit, send us an Intro email to contact AT ipadinsight.com.

I’ve got an iPad Insight site milestone to share today. Well, actually  I had meant to look out for this number and mark it, but I goofed and I’m noting it a little late. In any case, this site has now had more than 25 million page views.

In fact, as you can see in the screencap above, it now has over 27 million page views.

That’s a big number for a niche site single-focused on the iPad. It still feels a little unreal to see that number, knowing how this site started from ground zero sort of thing.

I’d like to say a big thanks to Thomas Wong, James Potter, Beth Elderkin, Henry Tourtillotte, Fareez Shuib, Sheila Bigel, Teresa España, and Alicia Bankhofer for the articles they’ve written for the site.

And of course a huge thanks to all of you who visit the site and read our articles, on your iPads, desktop PCs, and whichever other devices you use to view our content. There would be no point in, and certainly no joy in, doing this without you. Thanks a million, or even 27 million!