Apple announces iPad 2 with new design, faster A5 processor - Page 5

60,000 of which all do the same damn thing.

How many apps does one REALLY need? Personally, anytime I think of a way to use my phone, there's been an app in the market place to help me accomplish my goal.

After a while, it just gets redundant, and Android's market place is healthy enough that your argument is invalid

You fold it around the back.

The summer won't go to Android. Apple will have an iPad 3 someday and reduce the entry point of iPad 2. Most of these copycats can compete. And iOS is a much better OS than Android's latest first attempt at a tablet OS. Let's see if any Android manufacturer can do iMovie or GarageBand. They can't because the API set is nowhere near as good.

It's not about what can't be run NOW, it's about what COULD potentially run later with larger ram sizes...

Here is the best part: the HDMI cable works with iPhone, iPod touch and iPad 1, as well as the new iPad. With iOS 4.3 I am assuming that those that don't want to buy iPad 2 can still get to take advantage of this new capability simply by upgrading their OS and buying the cable.

Am I right about this?

i wouldn't go that far into derisive commentary. here's a quick look at that hardware specifications among a few tablets. http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/02/i...erry-playbook/ each tablet will serve their markets; who comes out on top is meaningless so long as whichever tablet satisfies the user requirements.

I'm guessing they may have used one or two unused pins in the connector, but as with other video technologies, you can put digital and analog signals on some of the same wires, and get a different result with the adapter you use. I imagine Apple doing something similar here in a bid to keep as many pins unused as possible for future things.

Actually your last sentence contradicts your first. I am dealing with this Summer - buy an iPad with 65k apps or an overpriced xoom, with a new untested OS and nothing like FaceTime, iMovies or GarageBand.

Apple has won. All it needs now is to release the ipad 3 this year, reduce price points on the iPad 2 and the rest ses dust.

I'm on the fence, too. Ultimately, though, I never even use the data up to my limit on my iPhone, and I use it liberally when not in a Wi-Fi network or I just don't feel like typing in a password. And most of what I would do outside of a Wi-Fi network I can just do on my iPhone for the rare times that I need to. I already pay for data that I don't use; I guess I don't think it's a good idea to pay for yet more data that I likely won't use. That way, it helps me justify getting a higher-capacity iPad (32GB) for almost the same amount of money for the 16GB model with 3G.

So you refer to the World Trade Center attacks as "11/9"? Not quite as catchy, is it?

To be able to plug it into the docks that will/should inevitably appear. With one TB connector you could connect the iPad to keyboard, external monitor, external speakers, and even external storage. Yes, laptops are designed for that, but it'd be cool for the iOS devices to be able to do it, too. And there will be other devices with TB on them - like probably sound mixing consoles, maybe video cameras. It's a small, fast connector. Yes, it's bus level (whatever that means), but I hope we see it popping up in interesting, unexpected places.

- Jasen.

Now I'm jealous as SHIT rofl

The idea of loading up a bunch of 700mb movie files and bringing them to a friend's house has always been appealing to me. I'm real curious about how Apple implements this. Will DRM play a role? What about simultaneous charging while outputting to the tv? :/

OK, I really want one of these. When the iPad1 came out, I said to myself that I would wait until v2. Now, v2 is out, and I don't think I have the money to get one right away.

So, who here wants to buy one for me?

This seems like a very impressive upgrade, really. A5, much better graphics, HDMI out, thinner, etc. I'm really excited about this. I'm even excited about the Garage Band app, and I have the musical talent of a turtle.

I have to say, I don't get a lot of the criticisms I've seen so far.

i'm more interested to know if multichannel audio (lossy or otherwise) will be bitstreamed across the cable for media that has 5.1 AAC audio. from the specs i've read, it looks like MP4 container support, for audio, is limited to stereo. does anyone have a reliable source to clarify this point? thanks.

Wait a second, release ipad 3 this year? you really think they will?

As far as nothing like the apps, you mentioned; imovies and garageband perhaps, but there are alternatives to facetime.

And how long do you think it will take for someone to make a knockoff of imove or garageband for android tablets?

Looks nice, but no capacity bump and price cut, plus no retina display, mean I will be waiting till the next revision.

More memory wI'll be very important. I woud like more on my current ipad for the browser. I hate when i switch pages it has to reload every time. I know this is a way of keeping the memory footprint more manageable. Bigger buffers will help with app switching as well.


I am interested that they mentioned 9x graphics speedup. This means that it could drive a Retina-type density display at iPad size twice as fast as the current iPad runs it's current 1024x768 display. Obviously was just a cost/manufacturability issue as to why they didn't bump the display, not a performance issue.

But, there are only 2 free pinouts out of 30...

Assume the 4 pin USB is passed through, then

19 > 2 out of 30

HDCP is supported by the HDMI specification (versions 1.0 and above). if the media mandates the use of HDCP, then whatever is connected to the iPad 2 via HDMI will have to accept and properly handle the handshake to permit video and audio transfer.

The problem with the XOOM is that its supporters are saying that there are all those Android apps, just as Steve Jobs said last year that the iPad could run all those iPhone apps.

iPad owners quickly learned, however, that they didn't like running non-optimized apps on their tablet.

When I tested out the XOOM I loaded both the NYT and MLB apps and they were pathetic compared to their iPad equivalents. At best, they were iPhone versions on a nice display.

The problem is that developers may not mind developing for multiple platforms, but they certainly don't like having to do multiple versions of the same app for the same platform. Until there are millions of Android tablets out there in the market, in the hands of consumers, all running the same version of Android, those optimized apps will only trickle out.

Give it at least another six months, then the XOOM might get interesting.

This guy is so out of the. real world. How can this happen? He claims to own an iPad but probably forgot to unbox it.

Cool incremental update. Nice jump in processor speed, looks promising for iPhone 5!

Other than that, nothing really revolutionary (not that that was necessary), but I guess this does leave room for a new iPad 3 before the holiday season... Not saying it will, but it could. If Apple releases iOS5 before the holiday season that could be enough of a sales boost as well.

Then again, I think this iPad 2 is just meant to meet or exceed the coming competitors spec wise. Then, by the end of the year, Apple is going to blow them out of the water again using their sweet little component contracts Tim Cook is arranging as we speak.

You'll have to pay for that 3G one way or the other. If you use your iPhone, AT&T will charge an extra fee to let you use the Personal Hotspot. If you buy an iPad with 3G you'll have to pay for data, again through AT&T (or Verizon). The carriers are going to get their money one way or another.

If you already own an iPhone, and you carry it around with you at all times, as I do, it seems smart to just buy the WiFi iPad -- at least you save a few bucks at the beginning.

The *moment* someone posts Plants vs Zombies HD running smoothly on their TV, I'm sold.

Yes, especially when they are advertised as features that differentiate the Xoom and make it superior to the iPad.

Maybe the mfgrs need another column in their specs for "Phantom Pheatures"

Let the Mac apologist backtracking begin...

IPads will not have built in cameras. Nobody cares about cameras on an iPad.

You have an ultra-portable 50" HD Tele?

iPad2 is saying: -Retina display! I'm ready for you now! See you next time!

I can't speak for the poster, but for me this is the most crucial aspect of the upgrade and it's a bit annoying not to know what memory it has until iFixit tears it down.

It has a great effect on multitasking. If I'm writing in Pages and I switch to another app I can come back to Pages and there is a bit of a pause before it's available to me because it has to switch the document back into memory. If I instead switch out and then to a third app and then back to Pages, Pages has not only flushed the cache, it's saved the document and returned me to the beginning. Since I work on 50,000 to 60,000 word documents, this is very very annoying and almost a deal breaker.

One of Pages great weaknesses (on the iPad), is it's very cumbersome to scroll through long documents and the magnifier shortcut tool doesn't work very well for this purpose either. So if you're writing a long document and your two thirds of the way through it takes a full minutes of screwing around to get back to where you were when it dumps you to the beginning.

If the memory really is doubled, this effect should be minimised or even eliminated in most situations. If the memory is the same, all the speed improvements in the world won't make any difference to the user experience. Hopefully a (sorely needed) update to Pages for iPad is in the works also and should help things.

It looks pretty good, but not enough to make me want to sell my iPad 1.

iOS 5 will take advantage of the hardware improvements, which is the thing that will make me want to upgrade - depending on what they add. I'm wondering why they haven't moved iOS upgrades from June to March. Surely the iPad will be more significant than the iPhone? Couldn't really expect too much more than the improvements announced. Except a higher-res screen!

Well iMovie 2 for iOS doesn't run on the original iPad but it is available for iPhone 4 and the latest iPod touch. I guess this is because of RAM... SO it's safe to assume iPad 2 has at least 512MB.

Unless of course Apple believes that people wouldn't want iMovie on the original iPad because it doesn't have a camera...

Have you looked at an iPhone 4? The screen resolution of the iPhone 4 retina display is hands-down amazing. Everyone who looks at mine gasps, even if they don't even know what "resolution" means. The iPad screen, while still a great resolution, is a bit grainy by direct comparison.

iPhone 4: 326ppi
iPad 1/2: 132ppi

Now, the iPad screen still looks amazing-- and if I didn't have my eyes glued to my iPhone so much I would have no complaints. But after seeing laser printer-like text in iBooks on the iPhone 4, I yearn for 300+ ppi on the iPad. The 9x graphics engine in the A5 should be able to handle it!

What "they" are you referring to exactly? I don't even see the "old" iPads on the Apple Store any longer. They are going to sell out the current stock, most likely at the current price point, and then roll out the iPad 2. If someone is blind enough to buy an iPad in the next week, then that's pretty dumb.

I fail to see how the Xoom is overpriced. I paid $829 for my iPad. The Xoom costs $799 without contract.

I also remember the lack of iPad native apps available when I powered up my iPad on day one.

The bickering back and forth makes me laugh. I love my iPad and wont give it up till Apple makes one with 4G and MORE resolution. Having said that I am considering purchasing a Xoom to play with.

I'm a huge iPad fan boy. I've had 2 since the 1st month they were out. I love them and use them every day. I gush to friends who ask and defend them against those who mock. That said, I think this is a disappointing update...here's why.

I've been saying to all those Android proponents that I'm sure they'll love their vaporware when it comes to market as they will all certainly match the original iPad...just in time for iPad 2 to blow them away. Yes, all the new tablest have cameras, but just wait til you see what Apple will do.

The 3 main 'upgrades' are:

-processor speed - awesome...love it! Great job!
-camera - blah...Apple is actually late to this party. Should have been on iPad1. Not really relavent to most as facetime, for all the hype, is a feature little used beyond the novelty stage.
-Form factor. It's nice...a little slimmer (though like Phone2, the illusion of thinner is there because of the angled edges) and little lighter, but did anyone think the iPad1 was too think or heavy??

What would have blown the competition away and left them playing catch up once more are:

-retina display...or even just a better display.
-built in HDMI out...please no more with the damn nickel and dime adaptor crap.
-USB out - see above.
-SD card slot.
-tether ap that would let iPhone owners tether their iPad via wifi with no additional data plan. This would encourage those with iPhones to buy iPads and vice versa.

Butu hey, there's a cool case

Yeah, I didn't even bother reading the article -- the headline caught my eye (and I don't like the way that site chops articles in multiple pages just to get hits).

The crowded field the iPad 2 is entering consists of:

-- 15 million plus little brother iPad 1s
-- 2,000 ? plus Galaxy Tabs
-- 1,000 ? plus Xooms
-- 0 PlayBooks
-- 0 TouchPads
-- 0 ? HP Slates

Did I miss anybody.

Seems like the crowd is mostly just family!

.

Not sure about Playbook, but compared to Honeycomb tablets, iPad 2 doesn't really seem to be much different. Will be interesting to see benchmarks for CPU and graphics on both iPad 2 and Honeycombs, but on paper, Honeycombs still have a bit higher res screen, more standard ports (USB, SD card...), full Flash support (OK, we'll have to see this one to believe it)...

Plus, you can bet that Android tablets will be refreshing faster than iPad is. At the end of the day, I'm expecting same scenario to repeat as in iPhone vs. Android phones. Which is not bad scenario for Apple, to be honest - they will remain biggest individual tablet manufacturer, but I'm not expecting them to remain dominant tablet platform for much more than a year.




Someone at Anandtech "confirmed" it has 512MB of RAM. Of course one always take such confirmations conditionally until confirmed by official source.

So I could play a drm protected movie, so long as the cable is hooked up to hdcp monitor or tv. What about regular movie files? Like pirated avi files?

Um, there's GPS in the iPhone you are tethering to if you are using the personal hot-spot feature. That said, I thought I read that some myfi devices can pass their GPS coordinates to a device connected to them. I wonder if the personal hotspot feature does that if you wanted to see the location on the bigger screen of the iPad? For the $100 price of the external device, you might want to simply pay a little extra for the 3G iPad, even if you don't get a 3G contract I beleive the GPS still works, right?


I think the container support only lists the format it can decode and play back internally (ie, on the iPad's own speaker). Apple's iTunes movies include the 5.1 audio, so the container can hold it, but the iPad itself would play back the stereo track instead of the 5.1 audio. But with the HDMI out, it will pass the 5.1 audio data and let the TV or receiver decode it.

Another HDMI question I have is about the 1080p support. iPad video playback is limited to 720p, and the screen resolution is not much higher than that. So is the HDMI output truly 1080p (like for displaying photos) or is it a scaled 720p resolution? I assume they'd have a tough time getting away with calling it 1080p output if it was scaled 720p, but you never know. Full 1080p for photo display would be nice. And if the screen resolution and UI elements on the iPad are one size, how are they rendered with the screen mirroring at 1080p?

No. The HDMI Mirroring will only work with iPad2. All others, it will only work with certain apps, like the VGA adapter. Sad, I wish it would mirror on the iPod Touch 4.