Tonight’s the night! The iPad 2 launch has been confirmed by Apple and is taking place at 6pm GMT, with simultaneous events in London and San Francisco, and rumours of Steve Jobs himself making an appearance.
Speculation has been rife across the blogosphere for months, and the main question now is whether the iPad 2 will be an entirely new and transformed device – a major game-changer – or whether it will be more of an “iPad 1.5”, with just enough improvements included to keep ahead of the curve.
Here are a few of the main rumours:
- A front-facing camera with FaceTime support. Practically a definite, this one. But will they go for dual cameras?
- Physical changes – probably something lighter (the original iPad had quite a heft) and perhaps thinner too, to give the iPad the edge over the MacBook Air (which is not exactly what you’d call fat in itself!)
- Some folks have been banding about theories that the iPad 2 will include a retina display, which would certainly blow other competition right out of the water – however, it doesn’t seem too likely that this will be included just yet because of the obvious difficulties in engineering such a thing.
- Better internal specs. Almost definitely more memory; at least 512 MB, if not 1GB, of RAM. Opinion’s divided on whether Apple will go all-out with a dual-core processor, but as almost every other major tablet coming in 2011 will be dual-core, we wouldn’t be surprised.
- Gyroscope. We’d expect the 3-axis gyro first introduced with the iPhone 4 to be included here, to bring the iPad into line with other iOS products.
- USB drive support. A screenshot from iPhoneHelp shows a USB drive app icon, so this would certainly point this way. However, conflicting earlier reports say that the iPad 2 doesn’t have room for a USB drive – we’ll have to wait and see on this one.
Either way, the iPad 2 is sure to be a huge hit, with rumours that Apple are expecting 6m ipad 2 sales a month, up from 4m for the original iPad. We’ve been busy getting our iPad 2 accessories page up and running, ready for an influx of gorgeous new gadgets and gizmos, and there are already a few compatible covers and cases available over on the main site.
and here is a sneak pic. of an iPad 2 case take in Barcelona last week.
A colleague sneaked a pic of this iPad 2 case
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