With the iPad event set to go live tomorrow (did we mention that we’re doing a live video stream?) plenty of speculation has been tossed around the Internet leading up to the event.
The newest nugget in the series of rumors over the last couple of days comes courtesy of Chris Taylor at Mashable. According to Taylor, the next iPad will actually be named the iPad HD. His sources include a Gizmodo tipster, a Romanian web forum, CNET and VentureBeat.
Chris Taylor of Mashable fame:
The first clues on this trail came last week, when a Gizmodo tipster uncovered evidence that Griffin and Belkin — longtime Apple peripheral makers trusted by the company — had ‘iPad HD’ cases buried in acres of dry accessory listings like the ark of the covenant in a warehouse of boxes. The site added another, less appealing rumor from an app developer on a Romanian forum that claimed to see an iPad HD show up in the apparently un-spoofable usage stats for his app Tapatalk … Practically the only new feature that seems certain to arrive in the iPad HD is the retina display. Indeed, it was surprising that Apple didn’t include it last year in the iPad 2. (Retina technology had arrived the previous summer in the iPhone 4).
The HD moniker lends itself well to the idea of a Retina display iPad, or at the least, an iPad capable of playing back 1080p (1920×1080) video content. We all understand what a Retina display is at this point, but the general population may not. The HD name though, now that’s something everyone understands at this point. However, there’s really only one thing we can deduce from an HD rumor. Should it be true, it could be an indicator that we’ll be seeing a spec update for the new iPad. At this point, given the enormous number of rumors and pictures showing off next-generation iPad parts, it’s looking pretty likely that the iPad will look almost exactly like the previous two that came before it. We’re okay with that. The iPad is pretty much perfection at this point.
