The Members Forum

In July of 2010, I wrote “The next generation iPad and what Apple needs to deliver.” Based on information gleaned from updates in iOS and information coming out of the semiconductor industry at the time, I updated that article in November and polished the crystal ball — in my usual purely speculative way — of what I thought that iPad 2 might look like or the features it should contain.

The iPad 2 is now here. For the most part, much of what I thought would be in the new model did actually come to fruition, but I got a number of surprises and also some dissapointments as well. The iPad 2 is clearly a strong following from the first device, but the improvements are still more or less incremental.

In the next version, Apple is going to have to up the ante considerably, because its competitors are going to have plenty of time in 2011 getting their respective offerings honed and improved for the next product cycle.

Let’s go through last year’s predictions about various anticipated features in the iPad 2 to find out where the hit and misses were, and to see if there is room for improvement in any of these areas.

Gyroscope

Firstly we can say that right off the bat, the new iPad will almost certainly have the same built-in gyroscope that the iPhone 4 has in addition to the accelerometer. This is a no-brainer addition, as it vastly improves responsiveness and precision control for games and also will permit the creation of even more immersive augmented-reality applications on the tablet.

Yup, the iPad 2 did in fact get a gyroscope, likely the same or similar part that’s in the iPhone 4. So all futher iPads are going to have gyroscopes. Will there be new applications on iPad that will really take advantage of it? Does the iPad 3 need a higher precision gyroscope part? That remains to be seen, especially when iPhone 5 ships and we see what features it contains.

Cameras

The second is the question of a front-facing camera and FaceTime. While FaceTime is undoubtedly one of the best features of the iPhone 4 and the iPod Touch 4, it may prove difficult to implement in the iPad without radically changing the existing hardware design and the behavior of FaceTime itself.

Not only did the iPad 2 get a front-facing camera, but it got a rear HD-capable camera as well. In my original piece, I discussed some of the challenges of using front-facing cameras on full-size tablets. As of yet, nobody has put Facetime into practice on an iPad 2, so I can’t comment yet on how well the software translates to a larger mobile device.

ZDnet has the details HERE!