iPad 2 Announcement

The cameras were ready.  The bloggers were seated.  The rumor mill finally fell silent.  Moments ago we had Apple's long awaited announcement of the iPad 2.

Steve Jobs began by really surveying the success of the iPad over the last year, calling it the"post-PC device."  This included discussing how it was being used in Chicago schools, the ability for an autistic youth to get their hands on it and have it change their life, and playing out a video with images designed to pull at the tear strings of the onlookers.

Then it was time to look forward: the iPad 2 announcement.

Right off the bat we got something that most iPad 2 rumor mills had already been reporting on: the iPad 2 will include an A2 dual-core processor.  This will jump the power of the iPad 2 far beyond being a simple tablet mimicking the design of the iPhone in a larger format.  This will promise the computing power to be twice as fast with graphics coming in nine times as quick as before, which is almost hard to compute.

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Next was another assumed improvement to the iPad 2.  Apple has included a dual camera mode just like the one seen in the iPhone 4 and new iPod Touch.  This will come front and back, for looking at yourself and forward, and there is one very good reason for this: FaceTime!

www.engadget.com

The design is having a major overhaul as Steven showed it would be a full 33% thinner, which seemed unlikely before.  At 8.8 mm wide it is pressed against a laptop to highlight how thin it really is, and there is no way to not find this impressive in the current market.  With a weight of only 1.3 pounds you can expect this to begin defining the mobile tablet field.

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This is only part of the casing announcemnt as they finally stated that there would not just be a black iPad 2, but a white iPad as well.  This is a nice announement for Apple users that have looked for a least some aesthetic variety, but that is only a small part of the duality that they have now made apparent.

The iPad 2 is not just going to have the option of being AT&T service ready, but it will be Verizon ready as well.  This was not given with an incredible amount of detail or whether it would be the same exact iPad but with options, but now we can be certain that there will be a Verizon ready iPad 2 adn that Verizon will permanently be a player in Apple's booming mobile market.

www.engadget.com

Steve went on to brag about the iPad's ten hours of battery life, which is then matched with a full month of standby time on a single charge.  This is not an addition for the iPad 2, but instead a "tried and test" port over to the original iPad.

The other feature that is just continued from the original iPad is the price.  The exact same pricing set up has been ported over to the iPad 2, including the same storage space to price ratio and the same differential between Wi-Fi only iPads and those with 3G internet access.  What this iPad 2 price design also shows us is that Apple decided to both not create iPad 2 models for larger storage space and that they decided to continue Wi-Fi only models, both of which were rumored to change.

This all leads up to the big announcement fo the string: the iPad 2 release date will be MArch 11th.  On March 26th, the iPad 2 will then be released in 26 more countries around the world.