gdgt

Given that apple didn't mention any ram specs iPad2 probably has the same 256Mb the last iPad had. I can't imagine Steve *not* mentioning 'twice the ram' if there had been an upgrade.

So I think trying to run WebOS on 1/4 the ram that HP thinks it needs in the TouchPad will not be a good combination, you need the industrial design of the iPad, with the hardware and software from HP.

Kind of an insane assumption, mentioning RAM isn't really his "thing."

It's possible, and if true would be a DISASTER. Already on my iPad you can appreciate a lag when "multitasking," that is, it takes an appreciable moment after you open a "running" app until you can actually interact with it. Almost never notice this on the iPhone 4. I sure hope you're wrong.

i would have thought that it would have at-least been upgraded to 512mb minimum. Probably more. From looking at the hands on videos of the browser, there's definitely more ram than the original.

I suspect you are right. I change my position from 256mb being most likely to a belief that 512mb is most likely bringing the iPad2 in line with the iPhone4

My reasoning was given the very minor things that Steve likes to trumpet as giant improvements I figured a 50% gain in such an important spec for performance would be up on that keynote screen with a side by side demonstration of some kind. But after Patbon commented I took a look at coverage of previous iPhone announcements where there was a ram change (3GS and iPhone4) and the press didn't mention ram in any of their initial coverage. I'll wait for the teardown of course, and still think that the iPad would be ram light for WebOS or Honeycomb.

I hope to be pleasantly surprised.

"I'll wait for the teardown of course, and still think that the iPad would be ram light for WebOS or Honeycomb."

Yeah. The interesting thing is that if Apple does stick with 512MB in their tablet, they'll still be behind the curve. Engadget had a brilliant table recently that listed all the tablets out. I think the iPad was the only tablet out (or soon coming out) that didn't have at least 1GB of RAM.

I'll have to see if I can dig that up again.

EDIT: Here it is!
www.engadget.com­/2011­/03­/02­/ipad­-2­-vs­-motorola­-xoo...

Even more comprehensive:
media.precentral.net­/resources­/images­/000­/085­/957­/...

"requires PC to activate" Just a list of no's excepts the ipad.

Thanks for the links: The battery specs are hard to compare, with apple using different units. I did some (very) rough maths and got about 6000mAh for the iPad battery.

Doing some quick reading I suspect that Wh is a better measure of how good a battery is than mAh but because I'm lazy I did a single rough conversion to mAh for the iPad rather than try and work out the Wh for each of the other tablets.

In a pure spreadsheet data comparison it may look like iPad 2 having 512 MB of RAM could lead to performance problems (if it does indeed turn out to have 512), but we should keep in mind that iOS tends to be better at optimizing RAM usage compared to other mobile OS platforms.

Remember iOS doesn't support apps that could suddenly demand RAM when updating an RSS feed or other task. ie. widgets. So the platform needn't reserve RAM for said widgets when they fire off.

In other words it may not be an Apple-to-Apple comparison (Pun intended), since each mobile platform requires a different base-line amount of RAM to run.

In my opinion, a more important comparison is how quickly can tasks be accomplished; such as how quickly do apps launch on different platforms (including iPad 1 with it's older hw) and how quickly can the platform handle data processing, for example, loading a large webpage, opening a large video, launching the address book with 500+ contacts in it, launching the gallery app with 1,000+ images in it, etc. These are more aspects in regards to your actual use of the device, rather than comparing numbers in a spreadsheet.

Just my 2 cents.

As steve told, all the competitors only talk about the hardware. And they use android which is pretty useless. It should be the right combination of hardware and software. It can only be done by a company which does both and they do it specifically for that device which gives you the best experience.

Yeah, Apple rarely mentions RAM in any of their keynotes. I can't think of one time really. It's going to have at least 512MB. It has to. The iPhone has that much now.

There are many blanks in the specs at the moment. Anyone know what graphics processor is being used?

No one is going to know those specs outside of Apple until there is a teardown.

It was odd for them, but I'm pretty sure they mentioned it in the iPhone 4 keynote.

Yeah me too. The only problem i have with WebOS is the lack of Android type homescreen widgets. An OS with widgets and WebOS style task switching would be absolutely perfect.

Wait, what?

The iPad is running iOS -- that's as "its own OS" as you can get!

i mean it is very similar to the iphone... very very similar.

android 3.0 is a whole other beast pretty much

It may look similar to the iPhone version of iOS but there are extended capabilties that go beyond iOS to take advantage of the extra screen space. However after seeing the latest HP TouchPad demo on Engadget today, im pretty excited about the WebOS family.