Reports have surfaced saying that Apple has begun talking to television component makers, lending credence to the oft-repeated rumor that an Apple-branded TV set may be in the works. Gene Munster, an analyst for Piper Jaffray, predicts it may arrive sometime this year.

The Apple TV set is one of the more persistent rumors surrounding the company, and there’s no doubt Apple is interested in the market—Steve Jobs’ biographer Walter Isaacson said Jobs wanted to “…do for television sets what he had done for computers, music players, and phones: make them simple and elegant.”

However, there is some speculation as to whether Apple will enter the market at all. The Apple TV, a digital media receiver designed to feed content to a television, hasn’t sold particularly well since its introduction in 2007. And it’s often been stated that Apple won’t enter a market unless it can revolutionize it—as they did with portable music players and smartphones.

So then the question becomes, can Apple revolutionize the television market? One of the biggest issues is content, and analysts see three potential scenarios: Apple could take the TiVo model of providing hardware but not content, model a set-top box and pull content from providers such as Hulu and Netflix, or adopt a paid-content provider model where Apple collects monthly fees for custom content.

According to industry experts, producing a TV isn’t a quick proposition—most take a year to design and produce—but it’s not impossible to imagine Apple pulling off a product release late in 2012.

Although Apple’s education-focused event announcing textbook sales through the iBooks store occurred less than two weeks ago, industry analysts report that more than 350,000 textbooks have been sold in the iBook format. Additionally, as many as 90,000 copies of Apple’s textbook authoring tool have been downloaded.

In an event on January 19, 2012, Apple announced a new initiative to bring textbooks to iOS devices, with an obvious focus on the iPad. Similar to their previous efforts to bring computers into schools, this new announcement seems to be an effort to put iPads into the hands of students across America—and if early sales numbers are any indication, they might succeed, at least in the K-12 education system.

However, many believe the push to digital textbooks in university curriculums will be an uphill battle, with the primary concerns being the differing economic situation of students and the sheer quantity of textbooks used by most colleges. A spokesperson for Barnes and Noble’s college textbook division was quoted as saying, ““In a lecture hall of 250 students, all with different economic concerns, one might have an iPad, another a PC, another a print rental…. We’re moving into a digital world, but we have a long way to go.”

Unlike middle and high schools where school districts increasingly provide technology such as laptops to students to facilitate learning, most colleges expect students to buy their own equipment, which makes standardization difficult. A textbook can’t be offered solely in digital form if some students don’t have access to such a device. Additionally, while K-12 education often uses a fairly limited number of textbooks and other materials, university education demands a wide variety of textbooks, which presents an obvious problem in digitizing every textbook a college student might need.

In any case, Apple’s early sales numbers look promising, and most reviews of the textbooks themselves have been positive. The shift to a digital learning world is coming—it’s just taking longer than we would like.

Reports have surfaced indicated that Foxconn, Apple’s manufacturing partner largely responsible for building its iPhones and iPads, have begun manufacturing a next generation iPad.

Those same reports corroborate earlier rumors suggesting that the device will include a high definition retina display and a faster processor. The processor will reportedly be a quad core. The Apple A5 incorporates the Cortex A9 processor by ARM. To facilitate a quad-core architecture, the Apple A6 will need to leverage a modified Cortex A9, or perhaps an A15. Little more than speculation exists over what the actual clock speed of the cores will be.

The report also adds that the new tablet will offer 4G LTE connectivity. Currently Apple sell two different classes of iPads: those including only WiFi as a means of internet access, and those which offer WiFi and 3G connectivity. It is presumed that this scheme will continue to hold with WiFi + 4G LTE replacing the WiFi + 3G model.

iPad 3 is also said to bring higher performance graphics processing. The iPad 2, released last March, boasted graphics capabilities 9x more powerful than the original iPad of 2010.

Finally, the new model is expected to be slightly thicker than its predecessor. This is due to the higher pixel density of the retina display and the need for an additional backlight, and more powerful battery to sustain it.

The hype in the blogosphere regarding the imminent unveiling of the next iPad revision is reaching critical mass. Loyal Apple fans and average tablet consumers alike are eager to hear what will be offered in the new tablet, and when they can get their hands on it. In this article we’ll take a look at just a few of the rumors making their way around the net.

Release Date:

The iPad 3 is expected to make its debut early this year. The most prominent rumor being that we’ll see an announcement from Apple by the end of March. However, some speculate that a more likely date is February 24, which would coincide with the birthday of the late Apple CEO and founder Steve Jobs.  Apple are expected to have a press announcement in late January regarding iBooks, publishing, and their ilk, and so information pertaining to new products isn’t expected until February at the earliest.

Additionally, DigiTimes suggests that a second revision, an iPad 4, will be available in October. This rumor, however, has been greeted with a great deal of skepticism.

Specifications

The most notable hardware improvement that just about every rumor seems to agree upon is the inclusion of a high definition retina display similar to those of the 2010 iPhone 4 and the 2011 iPhone 4S. The display is expected to have a resolution of 1536×2048 pixels.

However, many also speculate that the iPad 2 will continue to be sold perhaps as-is, or with minor revisions and adopting the iPad 2S nomenclature used by Apple for its iPhone product line. This lower end iPad 2/iPad 2S is expected to drop in price from $499 for the base, 16GB wifi only model to $299 – $399 for the same model in an effort to compete with lower end, more inexpensive Android tablets available on the market already.

As for the processor, it is widely believe that the iPad 3 will pack the power of a new A6 chip from Apple. The iPad 2 and iPhone 4S carry Apples A5 chip, while the iPhone 4 uses the A4 chip found in the original, 2010 iPad model.

Camera

The iPad 2 is the first iPad model to sport not one, but two cameras. One rear-facing 5 (correction, 0.7)  megapixel camera, and one front-facing VGA camera for FaceTime video chat. Speculation around the net suggests that the next iPad will bump that up a notch and have an 8MP camera similar to that of the iPhone 4S on the back, and a 5MP on the front for FaceTime.

iOS

iOS 5, which made its debut alongside the iPhone 4S last October, is expected to be upgraded to iOS 5.1 before the announcement of a new iPad model. Many iOS 5 users have complained of poorer battery life over iOS 4.3. Apple have acknowledged that some bugs remain in iOS which cause the decrease in battery performance, but as of the latest iOS 5.1 developer builds have not eliminated the problem.

iPad 3 is certainly around the corner and so hype is building fast. As more information becomes available we will be sure to update you all here!

Some sources are alleging that the next generation of Apple’s iPad tablet computer will be unveiled in late March of 2012.

Those same sources believe that the new iPad will sport a long-awaited retina display with a pixel density similar to that of the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S. The display will keep its existing 10″ display area, but feature a resolution of 1536×2048, a marked improvement over the existing 1024×768 of the iPad 2 released last March as well as the original iPad iteration of 2010.

The iPad 3 is expected to complement the iPad 2 and not replace it. Some believe the iPad 2 will remain for sale but at a discounted price of somewhere between $299 and $399 for the base model. This, they say, is in an effort to compete with Android tablets such as Amazon’s profitless Kindle Fire. No information has yet come to light regarding the pricing of iPad 3.

Additionally, DigiTimes claims that another revision of the iPad product line will come in October of this year. The quick turnaround, DigiTimes says, will be in an effort to compete with the Windows 8 tablets expected to be available around that time.