Ipad 3: Expectations

Apple’s third generation version of the iPad, presumably due in early 2012, will have to make substantial improvements in 
order to follow a strong but incremental second act.

In July of 2010, I wrote “The next generation iPad and what Apple needs to deliver.” Based on information gleaned from updates in iOS and information coming out of the semiconductor industry at the time, I updated that article in November and polished the crystal ball — in my usual purely speculative way — of what I thought that iPad 2 might look like or the features it should contain.

The iPad 2 is now here. For the most part, much of what I thought would be in the new model did actually come to fruition, but I got a number of surprises and also some dissapointments as well. The iPad 2 is clearly a strong second act following the first device, but the improvements are still more or less incremental.

In the third version, Apple is going to have to up the ante considerably, because its competitors are going to have plenty of time in 2011 getting their respective offerings honed and improved for the next product cycle.

Let’s go through last year’s predictions about various anticipated features in the iPad 2 to find out where the hit and misses were, and to see if there is room for improvement in any of these areas that could make their way into iPad 3.

Gyroscope

Firstly we can say that right off the bat, the new iPad will almost certainly have the same built-in gyroscope that the iPhone 4 has in addition to the accelerometer. This is a no-brainer addition, as it vastly improves responsiveness and precision control for games and also will permit the creation of even more immersive augmented-reality applications on the tablet.

Yup, the iPad 2 did in fact get a gyroscope, likely the same or similar part that’s in the iPhone 4. So all future iPads are going to have gyroscopes. Will there be new applications on iPad that will really take advantage of it? Does the iPad 3 need a higher precision gyroscope part than what is shipping today? That remains to be seen, especially when iPhone 5 ships and we see what features it contains.

Cameras

The second is the question of a front-facing camera and FaceTime. While FaceTime is undoubtedly one of the best features of the iPhone 4 and the iPod Touch 4, it may prove difficult to implement in the iPad without radically changing the existing hardware design and the behavior of FaceTime itself.

Not only did the iPad 2 get a front-facing camera, but it got a rear HD-capable camera as well. In my original piece, I discussed some of the challenges of using front-facing cameras on full-size tablets. As of yet, nobody has put Facetime into practice on an iPad 2, so I can’t comment yet on how well the software translates to a larger mobile device.

However, I would expect that the specs on both the front and the rear cameras on iPad 3 to be improved. iPad 2 uses a VGA-capable camera on the front and a “HD” camera that can do 720p video in the rear. Competitors which are shipping with integrated cameras in 2011 include the Blackberry PlayBook, which sports a 3MP video camera in the front and a 5MP in the rear, and the Motorola XOOM, which is 2MP in the front and 5MP in the rear.

Memory

It should also be stated that the next-generation iPad should be brought to parity or exceed the memory capabilities as its flagship phone counterpart. The iPhone 4 has 512MB of main memory in its A4 Package on a Package (PoP), but the iPad currently only has 256MB, the same as the iPhone 3GS.

So we don’t know yet how much memory the iPad 2 ships with on the updated A5 SoC barring a X-Ray examination of the PoP, but current industry scuttlebutt seems to suggest that Apple went with a conservative 512MB on the device, while also increasing the memory bandwidth.

I think that I can speak for many of us that I was disappointed that Apple didn’t go for 1GB like its Android competitors, but I can certainly understand their reasons for wanting to keep costs down. In the iPad 3, I would expect flash prices to have fallen enough in 2011 that next year’s device will have 1GB of RAM.

Central Processing Unit (CPU)

The current 1Ghz A4 System-on-a-Chip (SoC) processor in my opinion, interestingly enough, has been more than ample, but a dual-core and/or higher-clocked version of the chip with more integrated cache and improved integrated PowerVR graphics is probably in the works.

Apple delivered the goods with a dual-core A5, based on the ARM Cortex-A9 architecture, with substantially improved graphics performance. They didn’t improve the clock speed, presumably to keep manufacturing design costs low and to keep battery performance at parity with the first model. An X-Ray examination of the PoP will actually determine whether or not the A5 is a totally new design, or simply two A4 cores tied together with an improved integrated GPU.

Room for improvement in the iPad 3 will be yet more graphics performance (particularly if the screen resolution is improved) such as moving to a PowerVR SGX6 GPU, increased clock speed and/or increased integrated L1 cache on the chip. The A5 has 64K of integrated cache (32K instruction + 32K data) like the A4. I’m not expecting a quad-core design in the next iPad on the A6 or A8, but I wouldn’t put it out of the question that it exists in Apple’s roadmap over the next two years.