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.