Unboxing videos for the new iPad are pouring in today and among the first to show up was from Vietnamese technology site Tinhte.vn.
If you already own a first-generation iPad or iPad 2, you aren’t missing out on much since the packaging hasn’t changed and neither has the design of the new iPad from its predecessor. It is just a bit thicker at 9.4mm compared to the iPad 2’s 8.8mm and 0.7 lbs heavier at 1.4 lbs but the minute differences are negligible. The real showstopper is the 2048×1536 retina display, which is immediately obvious the moment you turn on the tablet. The high pixel density — comparable to that of the iPhone 4 and 4S — is apparent in the image above.
A few of the mysterious specs on the iPad have been confirmed now that folks are able to get their hands on one. The rumored boost to 1GB of RAM has been confirmed, which will help with heavy multitasking. The iPad 2 has 512 MB of RAM. Also, while Apple boasts a quad-core GPU in the third-generation iPad to deliver four times the graphics performance, the CPU clockspeed remains unchanged at 1GHz (2GHz total for both processing cores). If you’re into specific stats, Geekbench gives it a score of 756.
The new iPad will go on sale this Friday, March 16th nationwide. Apple will be opening up its retail stores early at 8 a.m. to feed demand and AT&T and Verizon will sell their respective versions of the 4G models. Online pre-orders started a few days ago, but shipping dates are already pushed back a few weeks.