iPad 2 Predictions

Everyone loves Apple announcements and all the hype building up them is so talked about that it’s almost ordinary for people to get so excited for them. The upcoming Apple event on March 2nd will expect to have a few new things, the iPad 2 being one of the biggest and most talked about. In addition, the BBC is hosting an event at the same day and time as the Apple announcement so one could predict that there could be some Facetiming between the two events. There have also been rumors of some new things being added or taken away from MobileMe. There is speculation that MobileMe will no longer be available in physical form, a possibility seeing how Apple seems to be trying to kill the CD with the release of the Mac Store and rumors that OSX Lion will only be available through download.


There have been a lot of rumors about what the iPad 2 is going to have so to clear things up a bit, here is what we know:


The Insides
Last year, when the first generation iPad came out, it was packing Apple’s A4 chip which then showed up in the iPhone 4, the iTouch 4g, and the new Apple TV (would it be called Apple TV 2g?). So it wouldn’t be surprising to see that Apple followed the same pattern with releasing the new A5 chip on the iPad 2 and then bringing it to the iPhone 5, iTouch 5g(?), and the next generation Apple TV(3g?).

What exactly is the A4 chip? The A4 is a custom system-on-a-chip (pardon the jargon) built around an ARM Cortex A8 processor running at 1GHz. Most likely, the iPad 2 will be packing an A5 (no word if this will be the official name) built around ARM’s next generation of processors. The multi-core capable ARM Cortex A9 has already been incorporated in to many devices that are already out today and has been seen in configurations up to a dual-core running at 1.5GHz. A 1GHz dual-core A9 is already powering Nvidia’s Tegra 2 which is in Android 3.0 tablets such as the Motorola Xoom and the coming generation of smartphones like the Atrix 4G and the Droid Bionic.


Retina Display
There have been rumors that the iPad 2 will feature a retina display due to some clues in iBook 1.1 and 1.2 that showed some artwork in double resolution (2048x1536). However this seems unlikely as the iPad 2 simply doesn’t have enough hardware power to accomplish this.