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Lafiel on 26 October 2012
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davygee said:
famousringo said:
I see the surprise bump to fourth gen iPad as an admission of two things:

1. Apple really wishes that it had the A6 ready for the third gen iPad, but they didn't, so they designed the A5X as a stopgap until they could design an SoC that would drive four times the pixels with the same performance as the A5 drives 1024 x 768. Now the iPad can run games at full rez without dropping frames or effects (though God I wish developers would let it scale if their game already has a choppy framerate) compared to iPad 2.

2. It's going to be at least nine more months until IGZO displays will be ready and suitable for the iPad, which is the only way the size and weight of the device is going to substantially change.

The competition? I expect Amazon and Google will keep burning cash in the hope that it will turn into profit somewhere down the line, while I think MS may succeed in satisfying the most demanding users. I suspect the users Microsoft attracts with Windows on tablets will be somewhat smaller than the users it will lose to the competition, though.

RE Point 1. I totally agree. Everyone was expecting an A6 in the iPad 3 until the last minute and then realised that the A6 wasn't ready, hence the over clocked A5 turning it into an A5x. But unfortunately the performance was a letdown, and it was noticed that the iPad 2 was performing better at 1024x768 than the iPad 3 at the full Retina resolution.  I would assume that the A6x chip has significantly resolved that seeing as. Will see a 4 times boost in CPU and GPU compared to the A5.

I hope that the annual model rotation has now moved to September/October each year for the iPad and iPad mini. This should give them enough time to implement the new Sharp screens with lower energy consumption hence smaller batteries and effectively a thin and light iPad.

Monday will be interesting, especially if Google release a Super HD Nexus 10 and it's likely to be at a decent price, although I wonder what CPU/GPU they will use and will they up the camera count and spec of camera?

I think the Snapdragon S4 pro quad-core/Adreno 320 combination looks likely. I don't really understand the need for better camera specs in a tablet though as it's a bit awkward to take pictures with it, especially with a ~10'' device.