Technology giant Apple, Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) is expected to release iPad 3 in March.Apple started selling iPad, a tablet computer positioned in a category between a smartphone and a laptop, in April 2010. The company released the second-generation iPad in March last year.
For the first quarter, iPad sales surged 111 percent to 15.43 million units and in 2011, Apple sold 32.4 million iPads.
Here are the top rumored specifications of the iPad 2 successor:
Design: Apple is always known for its design sense and it may adopt a teardrop design for iPad 3 that is supposed to be thinner than previous models with an aluminum plate casing. The iPad 2 is 15% lighter and 33% thinner than the original iPad.
Display: iPad 3 is expected to have a higher-resolution display. It has been widely speculated that iPad 3 may have same the retina display but with an improvised resolution of 2058x1536 pixels. iPad 2 has a 9.5-inch screen offering 1024 x768-pixel resolution.
Camera: It is rumored that iPad 3 would come with 5 megapixel camera with 1080p video capture. In addition, iPad 3 is expected to have a dual-LED flash and a 2 megapixel front-facing camera for video chatting.
Processor: The current iPad 2 has a 1 GHz dual-core A5 chip. But the iPad 3 is expected to have a quad-core A5 chip as Apple's technologies such as iBooks 2 app requires more processing power. It is also expected that iPad 3 would have a faster processor with a clock speed of 1.2-to-1.5 GHz, with probably 1GB or more RAM.
Siri: Apple is expected put its voice assistant feature Siri in the third-generation of iPad. Siri has been partly attributed to the success of iPhone 4S launched in October 2011. With Siri, a user can give voice commands to set reminders , schedule meetings and place phone calls. The potential addition of Siri would be a big attraction for iPad 3.