The new iPad
Every time Apple announces a new gadget we at Liquona tend to get a little bit excited, even after being disappointed every now and then. But what with our iMacs, iPads and iPhones taking all the space on our desks we couldn’t help but watch all the live blogs we could yesterday for the announcement of what we thought would be called the iPad 3, or the iPad HD. Turns out that for now it’s just called the ‘new iPad’, which begs the question what they’re going to call the next iPad when its released in a years time (probably).
It comes with a bunch of nice new features including an incredibly hi res retina screen that Apple claim is the best screen on any mobile device. At 9.7 inches they’ve somehow managed to squeeze 3.1 million pixels into it which is 4 times as many as the last iPad and has lead to each individual pixel being completely invisible to the human eye meaning the image your looking at is incredibly sharp as you can see in the image below.
Quite an upgrade.
The new iPads processor has been given a little update too featuring a new A5X chip and a quad core graphics chip. There’s also a new camera and your iPad can now shoot 1080p video (but we never really use those features anyway).
The other big feature, other than the spanking new screen, is the fact it can hook up to the new 4G LTE mobile networks. 4G is (funnily enough) the next step up from 3G and is 4-10 times faster (depending on network and where you are). While this feature is a nice add on for sure it’ll really be a viable selling point over here in the UK since our 4G networks are still in the testing phase whereas in the states they’re being wheeled out to nearly every city.
To be honest, since the release of the iPhone 4S which we all expected to be the iPhone 5 which a awesome new design and vastly upgraded hardware, I could tell that this version of the iPad wasn’t going to be a radical departure of what came before it. Yes the screens nicer and it’s a little bit faster but it’s really not all the different from the iPad 2 which is now a lot cheaper as a result. They’re not going to leave the iPad 2 out for the next big iOS update either so if you were thinking of getting a The new iPad and getting rid of your iPad 2 there isn’t really much point. Unless your a Apple fanboy (guilty!)
It’s not likely that Apple will make any big changes to its existing products for a while to come since the death of founder Steve Jobs. An entirely new product is also quite far off. The long rumoured iTV may take longer still to appear due to the appearance of yet another new Apple TV which (finally) features the ability to show shows at 1080p. A feature long, long overdue but you know how Apple is with trickling down expected features really slowly.
The thing is, despite the lack of truly new gadgets Apple are the most valuable company on earth right now. They have somewhere between $70-80 billion dollars locked away in their bank and they, unlike most other companies in the world, are making money hand over fist against the global recession. So you could say that right now why would they need to overhaul whats clearly working so well for them in the first place?
Still, it’s always nice to see some genuinely new bits of kit. The tablet market pretty much didn’t exist before the first iPad, we’d love to see what market Apple either invades or invents next.