Apple has sent out the invites and we know the drill. A teaser, a large event and unveiling of an all new iPad. Tim Cook and co would be out there on 7th March giving us the low down on the new iPad. But we can’t help analyzing what Apple would have in store for us. iPad is an interesting market segment for Apple. Unlike the iPhone, iPad has held its ground (though it is only 2 years old) and maintains a healthy lead over Android tablets. In fact from a usability perspective, the iPad is far ahead of any Android tablet out there. Apple would sure want to maintain that lead and in fact try its best to build upon it. What they are saying is “something you really have to see. And touch.” – that’s interesting. So what could the next iPad bring to the table?
High Resolution Display
The competition is already making its move. There are tablets out there doing better than the iPad in terms of pixel density and resolution. Apple needs to catch up here, in fact we expect them to up the game with a Retina Display that would do well for a couple of years. Apple has (allegedly) invested billions in sourcing displays from Sharp / LG / Toshiba and we won’t be surprised if the industry sees a kind of display that the competition takes significant time to come up with.
Processor, A5x or A6
Its been a trend and we are sure that the 3rd generation iPad would also bring a new processor. Be it A5x or A6, we know it is coming. The question remains, Quad Core or not? We frankly wouldn’t bother getting into that. It would support better graphics, translating to better apps / games. Leaving it for Apple to decide on how many cores they want to use, but given that the iPhone 6 (6th generation) would most probably feature the same processor, we would expect something that does well for another year and a half.
iOS 6
We suspect Apple might hold back this thunder for iPhone 6th generation. But we might well get some hints of whats next for iOS. Perhaps a release of 5.1 or 5.2 is more likely, but iOS would not be the same with this iPad. Just that we might have to wait for the iPhone to come out with the upgrades. We would also hope for some more multi touch gesture for the iPad 3. More Mac OS Like?
Inspire the iPhone 6
It is given that the new iPad would have a better camera, the current ones are just not usable. The battery life would be more or less the same, 10 hours! And that’s we believe pretty neat. But we wonder if Apple would bring in that one more thing? Re-invent the thing? iOS 6 with some thing really out of the box? Whatever the iPad 3 does on the software side and perhaps to an extent even on the hardware side, would directly reflect what the next iPhone would bring.
OS features or special hardware features, iPhone would draw inspiration from the 2012 iPad. For beginners you would notice on the invite image that there is no home button! Debatable, but hey, might well be true. The failing home button is the no 1 issue with iPhone 4. We would assume that Apple has worked to get rid of it… say N9 as a sample for implementation?