Apple iPad 3 to be quad-core, LTE and hi-res?
Now that all the fanfare surrounding the annual CES show is beginning to die down, it’s time for the iPad-refresh rumours to crash through the floodgates once more. The latest loose-lipped source “in-the-know” has been talking to Bloomberg, who believe they’ve got their hands on a few rough specifications for the new tablet.
Top of the list of new features is a quad-core processor, a reasonably safe-bet for inclusion with the rise of quad-core Android tablets, and the core-doubling jump that the iPad 2 made over its preprocessor. The extra processing grunt will allow videos to “begin playing almost instantly”, according to Bloomberg’s source.
That’s particularly impressive considering these videos are expected to be full-HD, running on an iPad 3 screen that is said to offer a higher pixel density than some HDTVs. Again, it’s a decent claim; we’d expected the iPhone’s Retina display to hit the iPad 2, and would likely rile many Apple fans were it not to feature this time around.
Lastly, Bloomberg’s source claims the iPad will be LTE-ready for super-fast mobile download speeds. It’s apparently hitting the iPad ahead of the iPhone due to the tablet’s more substantial battery. Again, it’s a decent rumour-shout, but with LTE still not widely available in the UK and much of Europe, it puts this feature into question. Apple don’t like to fragment their device ecosystem, and offering a feature in one territory and not another seems a very un-Apple-like thing to do.
All pretty rudimentary then as far as rumours go. We’ll expect to hear plenty more like this in the coming weeks and months, right up to a Spring launch, should the current Apple release schedule be anything to go by.
