Yesterday became national iPad 2 day as Steve Jobs unveiled the highly anticipated iPad sequel at a media event in San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The new device features a zippy 1GHz dual core A5 processor, front and rear facing cameras along with a thinner and sleeker design. The new CPU is said to offer up to 2x the speed of the original iPad whilst keeping power consumption low to avoid eating up the battery life. Graphics performance has also had a impressive upgrade giving up to 9x faster performance when playing games or watching videos.
The first iPad was chubby and needed to go on a diet. Cue iPad 2 with its slim and slender body that’s 33% thinner than the original iPad and up to 15% lighter. It looks really nice and I can’t wait to hold one of these to see if the new form makes the iPad any easier or more natural to use.
As with the original iPad, Apple again released their own case for the new device, which at first glance had me perplexed but is actually pretty cool. A ‘Smart Cover’ is a magnetic flap which protects the screen and wakes the iPad from sleep when lifted / puts it to sleep when closed. It’s a pretty new concept and as a result, quite hard to describe so hit up the link here to watch Apple’s official video showing the cover in action!
The iPad 2 now comes in either white or black, and (don’t faint) the white version will be available from day one! So what are your thoughts? Are you impressed with the new specs or were you hoping for more? Personally I was really holding out for a retina screen but I understand it would be expensive to implement, plus they’re probably saving it for iPad 3 (dammit I can’t wait that long!)
Along with a hardware refresh, we were also given a preview into iOS 4.3 coming along with the iPad 2 on March 11th. Improvements feature Safari upgrades and FaceTime, Photo Booth, iMovie and GarageBand for the iPad 2 all designed to take advantage of the new built-in cameras. I’m excited to see Photo Booth in action which takes advantage of the faster CPU and shows effects and filters in real time.
So there we have it (in a nut shell). Will you be rushing out to get the new iPad 2? Or are you going to believe the rumours and wait till September to see whether the iPad 3 will be released then? I’ve wanted an iPad for the past year, so waiting any longer now seems like torture! If I do get one *correction* when I get one, I’ll be uploading an unboxing video and review so stay tuned to Snap Gadget TV!
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