Report: Apple Testing iPad 3 in October, Shipping in 2012

The Wall Street Journal

Apple's suppliers in Asia have shipped small quantities of iPad 3 components for sampling in advance of trial production slated for October, the report said, citing unnamed sources familiar with the situation. An Apple spokesperson declined The Wall Street Journal's request for comment.

Apple is notoriously secretive about new product launches, often leaving partners in the dark until the last minute, but Kyle Bennett, Director of Technical Services at Simply Consulting, a Vancouver-based Apple partner, suspects Apple will upgrade the iPad 3 with an improved processor and a high definition display.

"It's definitely going to be faster. I suspect they'll put the next generation of their processor, like an A6, in the iPad 3," he said. "I would also love to see a high resolution display. That is the obvious new big feature request, as it creates parity with the iPhone 4 that featured the retina display."

Apple will increase the resolution of its iPad 3 display to 2048 by 1536 compared to 1024 by 768 on the iPad 2, but the iPad's 9.7-inch display size is expected to stay the same, according to the report.

Bennett thinks it makes sense for Apple to continue the current screen size, but has other suggestions for the hardware. "They could make it thinner and include cameras of the quality you see on the iPhone 4," he said.

Apple overtook HP and became the mobile PC market leader in the second quarter of 2011, largely on the strength of iPad sales, research firm Display Search said in a report released Thursday. According to the report, almost 80 percent of Apple's 13.6 million mobile PC unit shipments were iPads.

HP on Thursday discontinued sales of its TouchPad tablet just over six weeks after its launch. The company failed to reach its goal of turning its mobile operating system, WebOS, into the number two player in the market behind Apple's iOS, HP CFO Cathie Lesjak said in HP's fiscal third-quarter earnings call Thursday.

In contrast, Apple reported 9.3 million iPad units sold in its fiscal third quarter, ending June 25. Apple's net profit for the quarter increased from $3.25 billion last year to $7.31 billion in 2011.

Nick Gold, director of business development at Chesapeake Systems, a Baltimore, Md.-based system builder who partners with Apple, sees Apple's success with both the iPad and MacBook laptops continuing well into the future. "With all of these companies floundering on their tablets, and no one doing anything nearly as sexy as the MacBook Air at the $999 price point, in another quarter or two Apple will have pulled ahead in the mobile PC space even more," he said.