iPad News: 3G Version Here May 7th, Next Gen May Have OLED

Good morning. Happy Monday. How are things? Good? Great. Here’s some iPad news. For starters, if you’ve been waiting for the “late April” 3G-enabled model, the Apple Store has been updated to reflect a May 7th ship date.

So that’s technically late April if you consider a week into May still April. UPDATE: Apple has just announced that pre-orders will arrive on June 30th and retail stores will get units after 5:00PM on the 30th as well, so the May 7th date appears to pertain to orders from Apple’s website only.

Pricing starts at $629 for the 16GB model with data plans at $15 per month for 250MB and $30 per month for unlimited data through AT&T. Those are no-contract plans, too, so you can cancel and restart willy-nilly.

Second, there’s loose talk that the next generation iPad, that may or may not come out in 2011, may or may not have an OLED screen. OLED screens are very nice, very bright, and use very little power. They’re also very expensive. DigiTimes estimates that the LCD panel currently used in the iPad costs about $60 to $70 while the current price of a 9.7-inch OLED screen is around $500. So that price would have to drop tremendously between now and next year for an OLED iPad to make any sense.

bignumone

Yeah, adding $440 to the price would make it just a bit spendy.
I am still interested in the product if they can keep the price down and add some things to the “lower end” models.
mannymel

By $15 for 250GB you meant $15 for 250MB right? If not the unlimited would be very useless unless you’re an EXTREME data hog lol.
http://superlum.wordpress.com/ superlum

I believe change in ship date is for new orders for the 3G iPad. I received an email from Apple saying that I will still get my 3G iPad in late April.
pdxstoney

OLED’s very birght? Go check the specs on OLED devices they are at best 75% the brightness of an equivalent LCD. They have fantastic contrast not brightness. Use little power? again go check the specs. OLED power consumption is dependent on what’s being displayed. They are really low power when the screen is mostly off. But when the screen is mostly on (like in the e-book application over viewing this web page) they draw a lot of power.

Another major problem with OLED most writers seem to gloss over is they don’t accurately reproduce color. I think that might be a problem for Apple who is so prominent in the publishing industry. Apple even got sued for one model of thier laptops not being able to natively generate “millions of colors” described in their sales literature.