Just read about the rumours of a near-retina iPad 2. As a dev of course it's easier to deal with pixel doubled resolutions, but as a consumer I felt the iPad GPU was barely fast enough to handle 1024x768. Admittedly, this is just looking at the iPad as a games machine (high res for apps/browsing would be great), but I'd much prefer it to have the same res, or perhaps just a tiny bit higher, even though the latter would create UI/backward compatibility headaches. The benefit would be though that an improved GPU would be able to offer new levels of frame rate/detail, instead of being wasted (imo) on lots more pixels. The worst scenario of which could be that at full rez it might even end up failing to equal the performance of the current iPad. Sure, new games could still be made at 1024x768, but there's a lot of pressure on devs to use the latest hardware. In this case it means favouring resolution over performance, a balance which I think is not right for games. I guess there's a small chance we'll have the best of both worlds, and Apple will put a crazy fast gpu in it Just can't see it being cost effective yet. My 2 cents.
The rumours also point to the use of a GPU that can be scaled up with multiple cores. I hope to see an improved resolution as I think it looks too low-res, especially compared to my iPhone, but also want to see the power to make good use of it. The term Retina was used to indicate that individual pixels are not noticeable at normal usage distance. iPads tend to be further from the face as it is not held in the air so easily, more for the lap, etc. So the density would not need to be so high. I mentioned on another thread that I see 1920 x 1440 as a possibility. It is twice the vertical height of an iPhone 4 display, with a 4:3 aspect ratio rather than 3:2. This would make it easy for scaling graphics, and will fit 1080p video on it (1920 x 1080).
We dont really need hi-res screen for games or movies right now but text on iPad certainly needs a higher resolution. Hopefully multicore CPU and GPU will make the gaming performance on par with iPad 1 @ 1024x768. I'll be more than happy with that much I guess. There wont be a need to upgrade the resolution anytime soon once we have 2048x1536 and every year there will be a better hardware to support this higher res so whatever limitation this new res brings in will be eliminated soon enough. While this new res is just a rumor right now and I'm more than doubtful about Apple's ability to pull it off, if they do get it with iPad 2, they'll pretty much blow away any sort of competition from the market. Maybe apple will sell iPad 2 with extremely small margin but if it gives them a huge lead over droid tablets, it might be worth it for apple in the end. Apple already saw what happens when the underestimate their competition (android vs iPhone) and it'll be in the best interest of them to make iPad 2 as better than the competition as they can.
yeah the rumors: http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/17/more-details-emerge-on-apples-a5-chip-for-upcoming-ipad-2-and-i/ Cellphones, Tablet PCs More details emerge on Apple's A5 chip for upcoming iPad 2 and iPhone 5 By Paul Miller posted Jan 17th 2011 1:04PM So, AppleInsider has some new info on Apple's successor to the A4, which we were talking up last week, and our sources say it's spot on. Specifically, AI claims that Apple is moving to dual-core SGX543 graphics, up from the A4's single SGX535 GPU (also known as the PowerVR 535). What's particularly great about this move is that the graphical power improvement is rated at around 4X the current generation -- which makes a true 4X resolution iPad "Retina Display" upgrade seem much more of a possibility.
