The New iPAD – quick overview

Rumored for the past two years, the new iPad fea­tur­ing a high­er res­o­lu­tion Reti­na dis­play is final­ly here, and it’s sim­ply called “iPad “. Announced at Apple’s media event in San Fran­cis­co a few min­utes ago, the new device fea­tures the same design of the iPad 2 (flat alu­minum back with tapered edges), and it comes in two col­ors, black & white. Look­ing at the ini­tial pho­tos of the new iPad, a less tech-savvy eye wouldn’t notice any dif­fer­ence from the current-gen model. The new iPad, how­ev­er, is packed with com­plete­ly new hard­ware com­po­nents inside, so let’s take a look.

Reti­na dis­play.
The biggest new fea­ture of the new iPad is its high-res Reti­na dis­play. Car­ry­ing four times the pix­els of the orig­i­nal iPad at 2048 x 1536, the Reti­na dis­play will allow for incred­i­bly crisp text dis­played on screen, vibrant col­ors in pho­tos and images, and apps sport­ing detail like never before. With “the most pix­els ever seen in a mobile device”, the new iPad was demon­strat­ed on stage show­ing the increased qual­i­ty in read­ing text, brows­ing web­pages, and view­ing pho­tos. With 264 pix­els per inch, Apple’s Phil Schiller said “that is enough to call it a Reti­na Dis­play” — that is because, whilst the iPhone is gen­er­al­ly held at a dis­tance of 10 inch­es, iPad is held at 15 inch­es, mak­ing notic­ing indi­vid­ual pix­els almost impos­si­ble. The Reti­na Dis­play will also allow for 44% greater color sat­u­ra­tion.

A5X proces­sor.
The new iPad car­ries a quad-core A5X proces­sor. Apple says the pre­vi­ous A5 is twice as fast as a Tegra 3 chip, and the A5X will offer four times the per­for­mance.

New Cam­era.
The new iPad comes with a new 5-megapix­el iSight cam­era with aut­o­fo­cus and white bal­ance, advanced optics with IR fil­ter, face detec­tion, and 1080p video record­ing. The video record­ing app, in par­tic­u­lar, was shown as hav­ing a new UI. 1080p record­ing will also fea­ture noise reduc­tion and sta­bi­liza­tion.

Siri Dic­ta­tion.
The new iPad will fea­ture voice dic­ta­tion in 6 lan­guages through the iOS key­board.

LTE.
The rumors were true — the new iPad will sup­port LTE, as well as 3G. The new iPad has 21 Mbps HSPA+ and DC-HSDPA at 42 Mbps, whilst LTE will top at 73 Mbps. AT&T, Ver­i­zon, Rogers, Bell, and Telus will be ini­tial LTE part­ners, and the device can also be turned into an LTE hotspot. The 3G func­tion­al­i­ty is world­wide, and Apple claimed the new iPad has “the most bands ever” while refer­ring to its con­nec­tiv­i­ty options. The device will fea­ture the same 10 hours of bat­tery life of the iPad 2, and 9 hours while on 4G LTE.

The new iPad will come with the same stor­age options and price points of the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion: 16 GB ($499), 32 GB ($599), and 64 GB ($699) for the WiFi ver­sion. 4G ver­sions will be $629, $729 and $829.

The new iPad will launch world­wide on March 16th in 10 coun­tries. More will fol­low on March 23.

March 16th Launch Coun­tries
US
Cana­da
UK
France
Ger­many
Switzer­land
Japan
Hong Kong
Sin­ga­pore
Aus­tralia
March 23rd Launch Coun­tries
Aus­tria
Bel­gium
Bul­gar­ia
Czech Repub­lic
Den­mark
Fin­land
Greece
Hun­gary
Ice­land
Italy
Liecht­en­stein
Lux­em­bourg
Macau
Mex­i­co
Nether­lands
New Zealand
Nor­way
Poland
Por­tu­gal
Puer­to Rico
Roma­nia
Slo­va­kia
Slove­nia
Spain
Swe­den

The iPad 2 will stick around this time, at a lower price of $399 for the 16 GB model. The 3G version will be kept as well, at $529. On stage, Apple’s Schiller mentioned education was a big reason behing the decision to keep the iPad 2 alive this year.