Last year, just prior to launching the iPad in China, Apple attempted to trademark the name ‘iPad’ in the People’s Republic. However, according to reuters the request was refused, since Shenzhen-based Proview Technology already owned the trademark Apple sued, but last week the Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court threw out Apple’s claim to the trademark.

Proview Technology has been targeting Apple’s resellers in Shenzhen and Huizhou, calling for an immediate halt to sales of Apple’s beloved slate. If successful Proview Technology intends to extend the iPad ban across the whole of China  . It’ll be interesting to see how this legal battle develops – to any westerner it looks like piggy-backing on Apple’s good name, but the People’s Republic of China takes quite a relaxed view of such topics as intellectual property rights. However a country-wide ban would surely see Apple’s withdrawal from the country, and that surely would be unthinkable?

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An important trend in the world of the iPad is users’ increasing use of the tablet to read previously paper-and-ink publications. A survey carried out by OnCampus Research showed college students from 19 US campuses were willing to use e-books instead of traditional textbooks.

The use of e-reader tools is growing faster than expected, with Amazon’s Kindle now looking over its shoulder at the iPad and other handheld devices. Professional sports organizations such as the Tampa Bay Buccaneers have announced they are no longer distributing their traditional paper play books, and will be giving iPads to their players instead.

The private Ivy League Yale university has given all of its medical students iPads. Yale’s Daily News reported that “Yale School of Medicine students’ backpacks just got a whole lot lighter”.

Yale University plans to save paper (and money too perhaps) by making course materials accessible to the iPad. Students will be allowed to use their Apple iPad 2 in the lecture halls and labs.

Yale spends around $100,000 annually to copy, collate, and distribute materials. Materials to be made available via the iPad include the medical curriculum, patient information and valuable learning materials. The medical students will be keeping the tablets after graduation.

Apple’s tablet is gaining popularity in the wider medical community for several reasons, mainly due to its portability, reliability and the fact that it is an encryption capabilities which enable it to be locked or completely erased.

iSuppli has carried out a in-depth analysis of the design of the iPad and iPad2 and compared Apple’s flagship products with the five main pretenders to their crown – the Motorola Xoom, the BlackBerry Playbook, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, ASUS Eee Pad Transformer and HP Touchpad. From a design perspective, the competitiors were unable to match Apple’s design for efficiency.

Apple’s superiority of design was attributed to their in-house designer team and a formidable optimisation of the iOS to suit their own hardware, most notably more efficient use of RAM. Although the Blackberry Playbook and HP Touchpad employ the same strategy of an OS modified to suit their particular components, they were stil unable to rival the performance of the iPad. The other Android tablets simply port a generic Android OS onto their hardware, leaving them vulnerable to a one-size-fits-all system.

How Do They Do It?

Because Apple designs every component in their iPad, the OS and processor have been built with mutual compatibility in mind, and thus accomplish performance equal to or better than that of their competitiors while using only half the RAM. In economic terms this saves Apple $14 per iPad in material costs, which helps them control tablet pricing by producing the best-performing device at their price level. This erodes competitiors’ profit margins as they attempt to coax customers from Apple.

For instance the ‘bill of materials’(BOM) cost of the original iPad was $268, while to stick to those raw component costs RIM and Samsung had to produce smaller 7-inch models, all the while making do with a ‘one-size-fits-all’ Android OS against Apple’s hardware-optimised iOS. The iPad2′s BOM is $310, in case anyone was wondering.

The Gruesome Details

Only Asus and HP tablets employ the higher-quality IPS multitouch displays found on the iPad.

The custom-designed battery of the iPad enables the iPad to be ergonomically optimised to give a more comfortable feel, whereas non-Apple tablets usually have squarer, thicker, and heavier backplates which simply don’t feel as good, even though the custom iPad battery weighs an extra 100g. For the extra weight, however, the iPad 2 battery, at 6930mAh, has the largest capacity of any of the models examined in the report.

One crumb of consolation for Apple’s competitor’s was the considerably lower resolution of the iPad 2 camera compared to all the other tablets examined.

Overall Apple wins hands down with the iPad and iPad 2. Some of its competitors can match it in one or two departments, all of them seem to have superior image capture devices, but for sheer performance and irresistible design, Apple’s formidable combination of hard- and software is keeping them head and shoulders above the rest.

Check out these comparison charts courtesy of netbooksnews: