There’s been plenty of sensible speculation that the iPad 3 will arrive packing a Retina screen and now a clue lurking in iOS 5 has revived those thoughts. Previous versions of iOS have revealed future hardware specs so new software code is always worth combing through.
Back in January, before the iPad 2 arrived, images emerged online of iPad apps with icons twice the size needed for the 1024×768 iPad screen. That sent the rumour mill into a spin suggesting that we’d see an iPad 2 Retina display. It was not to be but code related to the iOS 5 Twitter integration appears to be hiding a magic number…
A developer delving into the iOS 5 SDK discovered that the new Twitter framework makes provision for seriously large images with a resolution of 2048×1536, double the current iPad screen resolution and precisely the figure that all those previous iPad 3 Retina display rumours were pointing to.
But it’s worth treating this discovery with some caution as the tipster notes he has only found provision for the larger resolution images in the Twitter framework. That could simply be because Twitter integration is a recent addition to the iOS 5 code or even just a mistake.
We would be very surprised not to see a higher resolution screen arriving with the iPad 3 with Apple’s rivals (notably Samsung) pushing to rapidly improve the screen technology in their own tablets.
Besides a Retina screen, what features do you want to see in the iPad 3?
Out TBC | £TBC | Apple (via Tech Unwrapped)
