iPad 3 Screen Specs

The All-New Frameless Holophonic Projection iPad 3D

[Source: Someone's Imagination]

As always there has been a lot of grist and speculation being churned out lately by the rumor mill about the many possible improvements we'll be seeing when the iPad 3 debuts this spring. With some honest competition finally appearing in the form of the Kindle Fire (albeit not directly, but for a portion of the market nonetheless), Apple can now start bringing out some of the innovations they've been holding in reserve for just such an eventuality.



But while many (if not most) of the rumors floating about remain just that - rumor only, and nothing more - at least two of them have received some support of late, and one a reliable debunking. According to Apple supply sources there will be no 7" iPad going toe to toe with Amazon et al. in 2012, supporting Steve Jobs' assertion (at least for the time being) that the smaller form factor does not lend itself well enough to the tablet environment for Apple to pursue in earnest. That move (if true) will leave Amazon with at least a year of market domination in the 7" sector (barring a late-year release of a 7" iPad), and possibly delineate a reading / personal entertainment tablet sector from a broader computing / multi-use tablet market by year's end.



And while rumors suggest Apple will continue to provide the iPad 2 at a lower price after the introduction of the newer model, it's extremely unlikely to go lower than $399, which is still fully twice the price of a Kindle Fire. But you never know. It's possible the entry-level iPad 3 will debut at that price with the iPad 2 reduced to $299 or so. But I doubt it. Still, everyone was fairly shocked when the first iPad hit the street at $499, so Apple's not exactly behind the curve here. But this is all mere speculation, just more grist for the ever-grinding mill. Chew on it as you see fit.



As for what we will most likely see, the supply chain source corroborated earlier reports of a higher resolution screen in the form of a QXGA standard 2048x1536 display (produced by Sharp, Samsung and LG), which retains the prior models' 9.7" size. That fully doubles the current screen resolution of 132 ppi to 264, making it the first truly high resolution tablet capable of displaying HD video and images. This will provide both opportunities and challenges for content creators who don't want products designed for the iPad 2's lower resolution to show up pixelated on the newer screens as have iPhone apps installed on an iPad in the past. In addition to this news, the source reports that Menebea will provide dual-LED backlight units to enhance the tablet's brightness, supported by batteries with 14,000 milliampere-hour capacity.



Finally, Samsung will continue to supply the iPad's processing power in the form the quad-core A6 chip rather than the iPad 2's dual-core A5. This additional computing power will be relied on heavily to display four times as many pixels just as smoothly on the iPad 3 (2x2 = 4 pixels where there was only 1 before; thus, 1024x768 = 786,432 pixels, while 2048x1536 = 3,145,728 pixels). So while the increased quality of a higher resolution display is truly exciting, it poses a serious dilemma for graphic artists and illustrators working to produce ebooks with a file size that's not outlandish. There is, after all, only so much memory available for storage on these devices, and even with Apple's current 2 Gb limit on file size, fully illustrated ebooks and graphic novels of even half that size will fill up 16 gigs right quick.



Now, it would take a fair amount of hi-rez images to reach 2 gigs, but with enhanced audio and video and some animations it's not outside the realm of possibility that we will start to hit those limits in the not too distant future. The recent Yellow Submarine ebook comes in at 320 megs, and that was done with vector graphics for the most part (which are suited to that style), whereas my Ring Saga project is all full color bitmapped images that create even larger file sizes: just 22 pages and an outer cover at 2700x3375 resolution comes in at 48 Mb with high quality jpeg compression. Those sizes may have seemed a bit excessive before, but now a full-bleed image for a two-page layout will need to be at least 2048x3072 in size in order for each half to fill the screen in vertical orientation on the iPad 3 (presuming these specs are accurate). I'll obviously shrink those hi-rez images for the final iPad version anyway, but nowhere near as much now as I would have done before this news came out. And I'm glad it did, because it may have saved me a whole lot of work in the coming months redoing everything that I've just done.