As we go to press, credible rumours point to the announcement of a new iPad, shipping within weeks. The first iPad is coming up to a year old, yet so quickly has it embedded itself in our lives, it feels like it’s been around a great deal longer. It has done nothing less than create a completely new category of device, one for which no sane person believed 18 months ago there was any demand. In spring 2011, the question is no longer whether the market exists, but whether anyone can dent Apple’s utter domination of it.
None of the Android tablets that have thus far seen the light of day have come anywhere close. BlackBerry’s PlayBook might do, but when it will ship is anyone’s guess. The best current bet seems to be on HP’s recently announced TouchPad (you see what they did there?), which features Qualcomm’s just-released 1.2GHz dual-core Snapdragon APQ8060 chip. That processor is based on an ARM design, quite possibly the Cortex A9, believed by some to be Apple’s choice for the next version of the iPad. Apple, like Qualcomm, is an ARM licensee, and its A4 chip, used in the iPad and iPhone 4 is based on the Cortex A8, a single-core CPU design.
The TouchPad has the same screen size and resolution as the iPad, and two options for flash storage: 16GB and 32GB. It also has a front-facing camera and a micro-USB slot, and supports Flash. And taking into account that it looks every bit as sleek as the iPad and runs HP’s nifty WebOS, it’s clear why many observers think the iPad has a challenger.
All of which means that Apple’s ‘difficult second album’ is going to be even more important than it might have thought a couple of months ago. By now you may well have me at a disadvantage. I’m writing this at least a couple of weeks ago, depending on when you’re reading it, and before the iPad announcement on 2 March, which may or may not actually have taken place. We both know about feverish speculation over the kind of features we’ll see in iPad 2. But you may know by now how many of them we’ll actually see. The idea of a Retina Display has been discounted on cost grounds, but there are still those who are convinced that we’ll see a dual-core processor, two cameras, more memory and that the iPad 2 will be both thinner and lighter than its predecessor. Much of the speculation stemmed from the Wall Street Journal, the same publication that’s now taunting me with a scoop on an iPad announcement in my future but your past. Reports from the Journal are taken seriously by a great many Apple watchers because of the paper’s apparent close relationship with the Cupertino company. That relationship, of course, also makes it an ideal place for Apple to leak false information, were it the kind of company that would do such a thing.
While it’s impossible for me, here in the past, to do much more than make educated assumptions, a study of Apple’s upgrades to the iPod and iPhone lines is instructive and helps discount some of the sillier speculation. For example, while a front-facing camera makes sense, given the introduction of FaceTime last year, there’s no logical reason for including a rear camera. Then there’s the idea that the iPad 2 will use ARM’s Cortex A9 dual-core chip design. The problem there is that while ARM’s designs are renowned for their low power consumption, the A9 is a good deal hungrier and generates more heat than the A8. If Apple has announced an iPad with a dual-core A9 processor, then it’s even cleverer than any of us have given it credit for. It means it has figured out how to keep the iPad cool and how to maintain or improve battery life while the processor is demanding more power. And if it’s done that while making the case is thinner and lighter, then everyone else may as well pack up and go home.
More interesting still is the release date: April. As Daring Fireball blogger John Gruber pointed out recently, Apple traditionally refreshes the iPhone in the summer, and the iPod line in the autumn: perfect timing for the Christmas market. It would make more sense to launch a new iPad at the same time. Gruber’s point is that there could be two iPad launches in 2011 – one in April and one in September. That, however, would upset a lot of people when they found out the iPad they’d bought in April was obsolete by September.
If Apple intended to align the iPad cycle with that of the iPhone or iPod, waiting another few months to launch iPad 2 would make more sense than launching a third version so soon.
Waiting until summer might also give Apple the opportunity to time the launch to steal the limelight from the TouchPad.
If iPad 2 did in fact launch in April, then, that would suggest that Apple is feeling a little more heat from the competition than most of us assume – and that can only be a good thing for all of us.
