I have an iPad. I love my iPad. That said, it's too heavy. 1.5lbs is really light when you have a laptop that you set down to use, but when you actually hold the device whenever you're using it, that weight adds up. It needs a better display. Please don't misunderstand me, the iPad has an amazing display compared to what was available when it launched. When you hold an iPhone 3GS up to an iPad the phone looks like it's using 16 bit EGA. But the galaxy tab and the iPhone 4 have raised the bar for what consumers expect. Finally, it needs at least a front facing and would benefit from two cameras. The new iPad also needs FaceTime. Also, if apple were smart they'd add the same camera the iPhone 4 uses to the rear. That would further lock up production capacity so that competitors can't use the backlit camera technology in their stuff. I'll be watching the keynote live if at all possible and I'll be following by liveblog if not. Should be a great event.
The 'Retina' display would definitely be a huge leap forward but can they make the screens iPad size for a reasonable cost yet? From what I understood that wasn't possible.
Camera is a no-brainer addition. Facetime/Skype video on an ipad would be amazing. I am starting to offload tasks from my computer to my iPad and this is another I would like to do. I already Skype on the iPad while working on my computer.
There is a charm to having trivial tasks, anything well suited to the app world, on a separate device than your computer. Somewhat like an extra monitor...but even more detached.
What do you mean by a better display? Merely a higher resolution? The iPad’s IPS panel is great and I personally hope that they don’t go with other technologies. An increased resolution would be nice but unlikely.
I'm always amazed that people think the iPad display is good. The text always looks blurry and poorly antialiased to me which I attribute to the fact that it has quite low DPI. Further to that the minute I walk out the door I can barely see anything on the screen - it's just not bright enough. I love the iPad in a few ways but the display is one of the things I dislike.
The iPad has the ppi of a 15" screen with a 1680x1050 resolution. No low ppi count by any means. It uses the same non-subpixel antialiasing as OS X and tests showed that it can get pretty bright and pretty black. Certainly no worse than a laptop screen.
By better I meant a retina display level resolution ideally behind gorilla glass. As I'd said, the iPad display is great, but the market expects more now.
A display of that resolution is infeasible with current GPUs, though. The device would be a combination of too large, too heavy, and/or have too short battery life. I don't even think it will be feasible in the next iteration; perhaps the one after.
I honestly think they made the resolution only 1024x768 on purpose to reduce the amount of time it will take to be able to cost-effectively double it. If they had shipped with a 1280x800 screen (like the Xoom's) off the bat, it would probably tack on an extra iteration before they could double it.
I'm still baffled by the lack of a camera on the first gen iPad. I'm sure there must have been a good reason for leaving it out but it seems like such a no brainer. It's pretty disappointing since there are a bunch of iPad apps I'd like to write that would require a camera but I don't want to release something that only works on the new ones.
Baffled, why so? Apple has never let perfection come before goodness. Or, more accurately, profit. Apple has likely made somewhere around a billion dollars profit off of the initial iPad release.
