Gadgetory

apple's new ipad its third-generation tablet beautiful thin oh wait sorry this is the ipad 2 here you go new ipad apple's new ipad a cena editor's choice looks really really similar to the ipad 2 also that's the same price that's always has starting at four hundred ninety nine dollars it comes in white or black and all the buttons and ports are just where you'd think and if you want a version that works on 18 t or Verizon's 4G cellular network you're going to have to pay an extra one hundred and thirty dollars up front but why pay full price for something that looks like last year's ipad well here's what all the fuss is about it's the screen Apple took their 9.7 inch screen and they doubled its resolution and it's something that no one has done before on a screen like this it's one of those changes that won't knock you over at first but once you get used to it you're not going to want to go back now one of the first benefits you'll see is that text looks great whether it's ebooks email or just browsing the web words are very crisp another obvious benefit is video assuming you can spare a few gigs of space you can now download all the way up to 1080p video from iTunes and play them on the screen and the crazy thing is Apple actually has to scale up 1080p video for this screen but really you know if the ipad is made for games games look outstanding your old games are going to look like a film of fuzz has been wiped off the screen and games that are optimized for the new screen and the new quad-core graphic processor look really great some of these look like they could be streaming off of your xbox another feature you should be excited about is the improved camera on the back the one on the front it's still pretty crummy but this one on the back uses a 5 megapixel backside illuminated sensor and more importantly uses the same five-element lens system that the iphone has you also get autofocus face detection and 1080p video recording with image stabilization here's what a photo looked like on the iPad 2 and here's that same photo on the new iPad here's a 720p video from the ipad 2 and here's the automatically stabilized one from the new ipad now i still feel like a toddler when i use this thing to take pictures but the fun of showing off photos on this screen makes up for it if you really want to get fancy you can spend another ninety nine dollars on an apple TV box and wirelessly beam your photos and home movies over to your home TV for a less fancy solution a $39 AV Adapter and hdmi cable will mirror the entire ipad screen to your TV so for me that's the core of what makes the new ipad such a great tablet even if it does look like last year's ipad for more information be sure to read my full review for cnet com I'm Donald Bell