iPad 3: What’s New?

Apple have just announced the latest update to their market leading line of tablets, but what exactly is new in the latest iPad that will be available on March 16th with pre-orders starting today – here’s a quick overview:

Display

As predicted, the display is of the “retina” variety boasting a 2048 x 1536 resolution (that’s 3.1 million pixels!), which is a 264 ppi making each pixel indistinguishable at the iPad’s normal viewing distance of about 15″. It’s offering 40% better colour saturation as well – so photos will look gorgeous.

CPU/GPU

An upgraded CPU was expected and Apple has delivered with the dual-core A5X with a quad-core GPU, which Apple claims is twice as fast with four times the performance of nVidia’s Tegra 3. Not sure what benchmarks Apple is using for those comparisons, as they sound rather dubious – but with the chip still using ARM’s v7 instruction set, such major improvements seem unlikely.

Camera

The back camera has been updated to 5MP with the ability to shoot 1080p video, although I always thought something as big as an iPad was a bit cumbersome as a camera when we all have similar optics on the smartphones in our pockets…

Siri

Siri is welcomed onto the iPad, with the device having a dedicated microphone button and the ability to get down dictation in US English, British, Australian, French, German and Japanese – I’ll believe that when I see it. Siri has so far disappointed with recognition outside of US English, but we can but hope.

Connectivity

The new iPad is offering vastly improved connection speeds with 21Mbps HSPA+, 42Mbps DC-HSDPA, and 73Mbps LTE. Now if only UK networks operators would give us some of that LTE goodness!

Battery

Apple is claiming the battery life is unaffected by the improved quad-core CPU and the broad-based connectivity, with the new iPad offers 10 hours on 3G and 9 hours on LTE – and impressive feat, with the iPad 2 managing only 9 hours on 3G.

Price

All these improvements are coming in at the same price as the iPad 2, so for WiFi-only models that’s £399 for 16GB, £479 for 32GB, and £559 for 64GB. For the 3G+4G models it’s £499 for 16GB, £579 for 32GB, and £659 for 64GB. No 128GB yet folks.