iPad 2 to gain double-res display - but not until 2012
Analysts forecast tweaked, not new, fondleslab
Another day, another iPad 3 rumour, this time that while the gadget will indeed sport a display with a higher resolution than the iPad 2 has, other specs will not change.
According to analyst Craig Berger of US investment house FBR Capital Markets, what World+Dog is calling the 'iPad 3' will in fact be the 'iPad 2 Plus'.
That tallies with a squeak from the start of the year that the next version of the fondleslab, said to be due now as then in September, will be a kind of 'iPad HD' unit.
Berger's mole says the new model is all about upping the pixel density from the current 132ppi to 250-300ppi.
If Apple is to be nice to developers, that means doubling the horizontal and vertical resolutions from 768 x 1024 to 1536 x 2048.
Doubling the dimensions is what Apple did when moving from the iPhone 3GS' 320 x 480 screen to the iPhone 4's 640 x 960 panel. The iOS SDK (software development kit) allows developers to incorporate images tagged '@2x' and the OS automatically displays these on higher-resolution displays.
Meanwhile, market watcher GfK reckons the iPad 3 - or iPad 2+, or iPad HD, or whatever - won't actually ship until Q1 2012, presumably as a direct, year-on successor to the iPad 2, we hear. ®
COMMENTS
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What's wrong with 1920x1200? What do you want, 1920x1080, which is the new widescreen standard? It has even fewer pixels!
I started working with 4:3 monitors, then I could not find any. Move to 16:10. Now, they are all 16:9. I don't watch movies on my PC, why do I have to use a widescreen monitor?
Maybe what you want is a higher resolution. That's fine, but higher res monitors are here already, and have been for some time. They are not affordable, because mass production now is 1920x1080.
The extra resolution is needed...
...particularly for ebook and pdf readers. The sharpness is just not there for small fonts meaning you have to zoom in on pdf's and scroll them around. The higher dpi will make it ideal.
@Juice thats how the current retina display stuff works.
iOS mostly uses the lower resolution coordinate system, but then scales it to a higher resolution screen. The performance cost vs the previous non-retina hardware is completely hidden by the faster hardware.
Nomenclature overload
So if this will be the ipad HD, what nomenclature will be applied to apps designed for this? Current ipad apps have the 'HD' postfix, so will these have 'HD HD'. Can't wait to rebuy 'Calculator HD HD'
Wrong
The display resolution is doubled, the pixel-density is quadrupled.
