http://www.macrumors.com/2011/02/09/ipa ... september/

what do people think? Maybe they will include the higher resolution screens that were rumoured to be in the iPad 2? Will this affect peoples purchase of the iPad 2? Not for me. I will be getting one as soon as possible.

Gruber has an interesting theory. The original iPad was launched in Feb/March, so we haven't had a new one for a year. So we're probably going to get one quite soon. Apple also have the event in September when they normally launch new iPods & the new iPod Touch, which generally has the same tech inside it as the iPhone they launch at WWDC the previous June. However iPods are becoming much less of a seller of themselves - they're essentially a niche product for Apple now - and that would be an idea spot to start rolling out all the 'non-phone iOS products'.

So Gruber's theory i iPad 2 pretty soon, iPad 3 (or possibly iPad 2S) in September and new iPads every September from then on, along with new Touches and iPods. So then you only have two events - June for iPhones, September for everything else.

Will I be getting an iPad 2 in march? Not unless it's a significant step up from my original one. And that means something more than just a speed bump and bigger storage. I don't do video conferencing so cameras would be no USP to me. It would have to be a better screen, a much better processor (dual core at least) and have some other new hardware features.

Jon

Interesting view, never considered that the iPods were maturing. I have heard rumours that they will be ending the iPod Classic. I prefer the larger storage option, even if it comes at a price.

Even if there is a new one later in the year I will still get one. I am thinking of the wifi version but not sure which capacity. I could get the smallest and see how I cope. As I plan to get a hi def iPad 3/4 version when it comes out as well for watching movies on the first one will be for streaming and apps. I will not even bother putting music on it.

Yep, interesting theory. I wasn't expecting iPad 2 to be much more than a tweak really - more RAM, speed bump, camera, SD card slot maybe, and if so only for photo transfer - but I hadn't considered September as a possible launch for iPad 3; I wonder if that would that give them long enough to get higher-res screens into production? Having a third-gen product for sale within 18 months of launch would take the wind out of the sails of the competitors, for sure, assuming the iOS updates keep pace.

Glad I'm not planning on buying another iPad just yet, anyway

Yes I was hoping for the double resolution which would make it possible to watch 1080p programs. Though other than the camera for FaceTime I expected minimal upgrades. Though I now expect that the doubled resolution will come in the next upgrade.

2048*1532? On a 10" tablet? Not this year.

Jon

Unless Apple does something with the Retina Display and the iPad.

Mark

Don't take this the wrong way, but why the need for a dual core processor?

The current iPad handles everything you can throw at it, including HD video and pretty demanding games. Video isn't going to get any higher definition than 1080 any time soon, and if more demanding games are to follow, then surely an increase in graphics (VRAM) and memory (RAM) would be all that's required? Unless it started to take on more tasks that computers are traditionally used for, I doubt you'd need a dual core processor. But that would probably have to come with iOS 5 - unless multi-core support is already enabled in iOS 4.2 - which would probably be at least back end of this year (iPad 3 territory?). I'd imagine a slightly speed-bumped A4 processor plus maybe better graphics for the next-gen games and apps is all we'll get with iPad 2, along with the FaceTime camera and maybe a proper USB port if we're lucky.

Ostensibly yes. But the screen in the iPhone 4 is actually only 1/3 the size of the one in the iPad, give or take. So you're actually talking about making a retina display thats 9 times the surface area of the one in the iPhone. The error rate in LCD screens grows at a higher than linear rate depending on size and thus the cost increases at a higher than linear rate too. Right now, the cost of an iPad with a 10" retina display would be... astronomical. I don't think even Apple would launch the iPad 2 at the prices that would require. As it is right now an iPhone with a comparatively small retina display costs pretty much the same as the equivalent iPad without one...

Possibly a micro-usb socket as well as dock connector (for the EU...) and I'd expect it to have the same amount of RAM as the iPhone 4 (i.e. double what the iPad currently has).

Why a dual core processor? Because in fact that's the way things are going. If you look at the way mobile CPU's seem to be developing, multi core seems to be the preference over increased clock speed. Plus a multi core chip doesn't use any more juice unless it needs the extra cores, whereas a chip with a higher clock speed needs more juice all the time - unless you make it able to scale down it's speed to conserve the battery, in which case you might as well just use the the slower clock speed to start with.

An upgrade to a new graphics chip would possibly be a valid alternative for games (and some other stuff, assuming they incorporate openCL support somewhere) .

Plus, at the end of the day, there is a marketing angle to have to take account of. Bigger numbers may at the end of the day be willy waving at it's worst, but the fact is most of the mobiles and tablets launching later this year will have dual core CPUs. The Sony NGP will have four cores for pete's sake. If Apple are stuck saying "well, we only have one core but it's fas.. no, wait, come back!" then it will prove to be a false economy IMO.

(BTW, I would actually argue that the current iPad handles everything you throw at it with grace anyway. There are times when mine is that irritatingly bit too slow to respond..)

Jon

I agree retina display would be unaffordable right now. Though what about the suggestion of doubled resolution? Could that be achieved by the end of the year?

If it can be achieved by the end of the year, it'll already be too late for any putative iPad 3. The design and production cycle will be well advanced by now.

Maybe, but there have been rumours of changes to iOS that covers such resolution so who knows?

If you were Apple and you brought in a super high res iPad now, you'd have the same problem between the iPad 1 and the iPad 2 as you did between the original iPhone and the iPhone 4 - if the latter's screen isn't an 'even multiple' of the former, you get massive GUI scaling issues. Things either look out of position (as many apps do under Froyo on the early Android tablets) or if you use some form of interpolation scaling things slow down and look fuzzy. And you can't tell App makers to make four versions of their GUIs, they'll tell you to sod off.

So as of iOS 4, the only options Apple really have are
1) Keep the iPad 2 screen the same res as the iPad 1 screen. This is fine - none of the competition have a tablet with a massively higher res yet either.
2) Make the ipad 2 screen twice the res of the iPad 1 screen - massively expensive and significantly reduces your production rates, as you have to throw many of the screes you make away.

So, as things stand, I don't think the iPad 2 will have a much higher res than the iPad 1, unless they do something really weird.

With iOS 5 though, everything is up in the air. Apple have had a lot of patents for ages on something called Resolution Independent User Interfaces - I'm sure you can figure out what that is, but to spell it out it's a GUI made from vector graphics (i.e. Illustrator) rather than bitmap graphics (i.e. Photoshop). There are bits of this already scattered through Mac OS - quite a lot of the GUI elements like the close/maximise/minimise buttons aren't actually 'pictures', they're PDF documents and they can scale infinitely with no loss of quality.

If you build an entire GUI from that technology - and the iOS GUI has many fewer assets than the Mac OS GUI - then as long as you keep the proportions of the screen pretty much the same, you can make it whatever resolution you like. This would be safe for all apps that use standard GUI objects and it would also be fine for games that use '3d' graphics - the things that would suffer a bit are bitmap graphics in games and actual app icons, which would still be fuzzy.

This would be a less traumatic route for Apple to take with app makers - they could make their Apps 'iOS 5 friendly' relatively easily, especially if they rely on standard GUI screen assets, the conversion of which would be handled by the OS. In fact if that's all there were, they wouldn't have to do much at all - it could simply be an automated check and recompile in Xcode. Otherwise they might have to redraw some graphic assets, but they probably actually have them in higher than iPad res already, so it's a relatively simple job to do. So that's a genuine possibility in iOS 5.. but who knows when that will come out?

I have to say at this point, the absolute best way of dealing with this kind of stuff currently is Palm/HP's WebOS. In WebOS each app has a 'card' as it's visible window and the cards are a set size. So while the resolution of the screen may change, the app's working resolution stays the same. A bigger screen just lets you see more cards at once. The WebOS tablet HP demonstrated this week showed it off brilliantly. The point is of course WebOS was designed as full multitasking OS from day one, so they had to think about these things. With iOS it was initially designed to expect each app to have the whole screen to itself - and the screen to be a set resolution. Apple rather painted themselves into a corner with that one.

Jon

That makes it sound like availability of high resolution screens will determine when iOS 5 will be released. It could be the iPad 3 or even 4 that are when iOS 5 is released.