This is the new iPad

Finally. After months of rumors and speculation, it’s finally here. Tim Cook has just unveiled the the new iPad. And though we feel like we’ve seen and heard enough about the device over the past few months to write a novel, none of that compares to the real deal.

As expected, the new iPad’s hardware has received some major upgrades. Sure, it might look similar to its predecessor. But when you take a peek under its hood, you can see that the iPad 3 is an entirely different animal…

The first feature announced for the new iPad is, of course, its Retina display. Just as suspected, the screen on Apple’s new tablet has a resolution of 2048 x 1536. Wow, that’s over a million pixels. 3.1 million total pixels to be exact.

Next up, the new iPad has an all new quad-core processor. Apple’s named it the A5X (weird). It’s 4X as fast as the popular Tegra 3 chipset, and should take iOS gaming to a whole new level.

The tablet is also packed with a new camera. The backside shooter is capable of taking 5MP pictures, and capturing full HD 1080p videos. But don’t let the 5MP part fool you, the system driving the camera is the same one Apple introduced in the iPhone 4S. So pictures should still turn out crystal clear.

And finally, as predicted, Apple has added 4G LTE technology to the new iPad — and not at the sake of battery life. The tablet will maintain its well-known 10 hour life point, and will be able to surf the web on LTE for 9 hours. Wow.