Report: Retina display iPad 3 to hit in 'early' 2012

Pouring cold water on reports that Apple intends to launch the next version of the iPad inside of this year, a new report says the company has yet to hit the trial production phase of the device.

A super high-resolution 10.1-inch panel from 

Nouvoyance that debuted earlier this year, similar 

to what's reported to make it into the iPad 3.

(Credit: Nouvoyance)

The Wall Street Journal says (subscription required) Apple is still in the process of pulling together parts from various vendors for a trial production of the device, which the Journal says is expected to begin sometime in October. A release is said to follow sometime early next year.

Previous reports hinted that Apple might surprise with a new model in time for this year's holiday shopping season.

One point of note from the Journal's report is that Apple is, in fact, planning to offer a so-called Retina display. That's a panel that has a pixel density that's high enough that the human eye can't make out pixels on things like text and rounded corners. For the iPad, that means the screen size remains the same as it's been in the first two models, except with double the resolution, or 2,048x1,536 pixels. Apple first introduced Retina displays to its own products with the iPhone 4, and it's since filtered down to the latest generation iPod touch as well.

The news follows a report last month by The Korea Times saying both Samsung and LG were vying to producehigher resolution display panels for Apple's iPad follow-up. A report from Digitimes earlier this week claimed neither company was reaching good enough yields of the display, which it said was keeping Apple from delivering a new version of the device this year.

A release early next year would coincide with the launch scheduling of the previous two devices. The original iPad was launched on April 3, 2010, with its successor arriving less than a year later on March 2, 2011

Elements 2 For iPad. Markdown Gets Prettier

You may remember Elements from last August, a time when new Dropbox-enabled text editors were popping up like mushrooms after a fall rain. Elements, from Second Gear software, distinguished itself by including a handy, popover scratchpad for taking notes, and with its Markdown-powered text editor. Now, Elements has been updated to version 2.

The new Elements, a universal app for iPad and iPhone, has a much-polished UI, but the main difference is getting things out of the app. It still syncs with an “Elements” folder in your Dropbox, but now there is a huge list of export options.

First, you can export you files as HTML or PDF to any Dropbox folder, not just the default “Elements” folder. You can also export to iTunes file sharing, to Evernote, to Facebook and to Tumblr.

The word, line and character counts remain, as does TextExpander Touch support and full-text search. There have been a few cosmetic tweaks, too. The icon is new, the whole app looks sleeker and more modern (there’s even a new default font — Museo Sans), and the Markdown preview has been cleaned up.

Markdown, if you’re not familiar with it, is a human-readable way to write HTML. You surround your words with symbols instead of ugly tags and when you run the text through the Markdown converter, these tags are added for you. Thus it shows up in the final document as bold. (You don’t want to see the mess of code I had to write to make all those examples look right in the browser). It makes writing formatted text in a plain text editor very easy indeed.

And of course, you can always use Elements to write plain text, too.

Elements 2 is a free update for owners of v1.x, and costs a very reasonable $5 for new buyers.

Elements – Dropbox And Markdown Powered Text Editor [iTunes]

With iPad Included, Apple Dominates the Notebook Market ?

Most calculations of market share in the portable computing arena don’t include the iPad, which they consider a tablet and not a traditional computer. But because tablets seem to be cannibalizing computer sales, it’s not a stretch to include iPads in those tabulations.

Based on the line graph above, the notebook landscape changes drastically when iPad is included.

Deutsche Bank analyst Chris Whitmore calculated global notebook computer sales up until the second quarter of 2011 in a note to clients. Not including iPad sales, Apple ranks last, saleswise, as a manufacturer. Including the iPad, Apple soars to snag the top spot.

Whitmore’s note included stats about the top six notebook vendors: Acer, Apple, ASUS, Dell, HP and Samsung. The top two overall vendors for most of the time period, HP and Acer, have had generally downward trending market shares since second quarter 2010, which is right around when the original iPad debuted.

It’s been pretty clear that the iPad has been eating into laptop sales for a while, and this graph corroborates that. But compared to Whitmore’s calculations in 2010, Apple’s market share including iPad sales has actually gone down slightly, from about 25 percent to 20 percent. Does this mean that all those copycat tablets are actually edging in on the iPad’s market domination? Lenovo’s three recently revealed tablet offerings look to be pretty good Android contenders against the iPad, while others like theSamsung Galaxy Tab have had decent sales but still don’t make the mark. And according to Digitimes, iPad sales are expected to rise 55 percent in 2012, while non-Apple tablet shipments are expected to jump 134 percent.

“Within the tablet market, the iPad remains the gold standard as competitors struggle for mind-share and traction,” Whitmore says in his note — which must help explain why the iPad is the only tablet included in the second quarter 2011 calculation, when many of the vendors now have tablet models available. He also sees Apple snagging an even larger piece of the pie as the back-to-school season sets in and the Microsoft/PC ecosystem is “relatively stagnant.”

The iPad is very clearly still Apple’s prizewinning stallion in the portable computing department. Even with innovative competitors popping up, it’s going to take a lot to unseat Apple from its dominant position

iPad to dominate the tablet market 'for the next 10 years'

Some analyst thinks so anyway

Apple's iPad will dominate the tablet market for the next decade, according to one analyst's calculations.

Charlie Wolf, analyst at Needham, has calculated that, even with other tablets including the Android and BlackBerry offerings gaining traction in the growing market, the iPad will only lose around 20 per cent of its share in the years up to 2020.

That means the iPad is set to hold over half of the tablet market for the foreseeable future, leaving the rest of it to be split between Android tablets,BlackBerry PlayBooks, HP TouchPads and Windows 8 slates when they finally begin to surface next year.

Top of the tablet pops

According to Wolf, despite the myriad new tablets making their way to shop shelves, only the iPad has managed to capture the public's interest:

"Future tablets are more likely to steal share from one another than from the iPad," he adds. "The tablet market has been inundated with new models… All of them have been greeted with a yawn and lacklustre sales."

He also cites Apple's well-stocked app store as a key factor in the iPad's current and future mega sales: "In the case of tablets, the only thing that matters - that turns what's otherwise a slab into a versatile device - are the apps.

"And the applications available on the tablets introduced this year number at best in the hundreds. In comparison, more than 100,000 applications are available on the iPad."

Anyone looking to snap up a tablet of their own should find our buyer's guide a handy steer in the right direction – even if you do end up buying an iPad anyway.

Restaurant Uses iPads as Menus, Restroom Mirrors

The best gimmick a restaurant can use is to serve excellent food, hopefully with efficient service. Failing that, the next best thing is… Well, anything really. Stupid menus where you have to read off food combos on a grid and tick the right box, like a math test. Waitresses in tight shorts and t-shirts. And now, iPads instead of menus.

That’s just what the “Do at the View” pizza restaurant is doing in Atlanta, Georgia, where you get an iPad instead of a paper menu when you sit at your table. Using the tablet, you can browse the “musically-inspired” (“do” is pronounced “dough,” as in do, re, mi. Get it?) dishes, call your car out of valet parking and change the music playing in the restaurant. You can also enter into the restaurant’s private chatroom and harass fellow guests.

It doesn’t stop there. In the bathrooms, you’ll find iPads on the walls instead of mirrors. In fact, the whole place seems to be designed to stop you from relaxing. Not only do you have to do your own ordering and music-choosing, you also have to contend with graphic displays covering the walls which flicker and flash like an iTunes visualizer.

Despite all this, the menu is priced very reasonably. And thanks to all the iPad-friendliness, Do at the View has a non-Flash website, meaning it is probably the only Web site in the world that can be viewed on a cellphone.

2020: Still the Year of the iPad

Competing against Apple’s iPad has been a fruitless endeavor for most who have tried, and sadly for the company’s rivals, that’s not going to change any time soon. In fact, the iPad is probably going to claim a materially larger share of the tablet market than anyone expects.

According to Needham analyst Charlie Wolf, the iPad will dominate the tablet market for the better part of the next decade. It will end this year with an 85 percent share, and while that percentage will decline gradually over the ensuing years, it will never fall so much that Apple loses the lead it claimed when the device first debuted. In 2015, for example, the iPad will still have a 72.5 percent share with more than 101 million units shipped.

And in 2020?

In 2020, Wolf figures the iPad will command a 60 percent share of the tablet with nearly 140 million units shipped.

How is that possible given unceasing cavalcade of new tablets parading to market? Simple says, Wolf. None of those tablets has managed to gain any traction with consumers.

“Future tablets are more likely to steal share from one another than from the iPad,” Wolf explains. “The tablet market has been inundated with new models — the Xoom running on Android’s Honeycomb operating system, RIM’s Playbook running on the company’s QNX operating system, HP’s Touchpad running on Web OS and many others. All of them have been greeted with a yawn and lackluster sales. None have been able to undercut the aggressively priced iPad, because the iPad’s component costs are materially lower than those of competing tablets. In the case of tablets, the only thing that matters — that turns what’s otherwise a slab into a versatile device — are the apps. And the applications available on the tablets introduced this year number at best in the hundreds. In comparison, more than 100,000 applications are available on the iPad.”

That will, of course, change over time. Still, that’s quite a lead Apple’s nabbed and one that it will undoubtedly continue to extend even as its rivals rush to catch it.

iPad Expected to Grab 61% of 2011 Tablet Market

Apple will sell some 40 million iPads in 2011, ending the year with a 61 percent market share, according to a report.

A Digitimes research report estimates that overall tablet shipments for the second half of 2011 will be up 150 percent on last year, with Apple shifting 25.5 million units between the beginning of July and the end of December, up 76 percent on the same period in 2010.

Non-iPad shipments in the second half of 2011 are expected to reach 15.65 million units, up 65 percent compared to the first half of the year and accounting for 39 percent of total shipments.

Where core application processors are concerned, Apple will again dominate, thanks to the dominance of the iPad. But the report puts Texas Instruments in second place, ahead of nVidia.

However, the report warned that tablet shipments in the second half of 2011 still face uncertainties and the key quarter for 2011 will be Q4, as a number of brand vendors have yet to firm up their strategies for the last quarter of the year.

Digitimes' figures reflect the estimates of Computerworld's Jonny Evans, who predicted in June this year that iPad sales could hit 40 million this year.