The least sexy iPad 3 part emerges...maybe
The glass front that will grace the front of Apple's next iPad has possibly turned up, providing a few clues about design changes in store.
The last few weeks have provided a delightful trickle of metal backings, allegedly belonging to an iPad that Apple has not yet announced or released.
Continuing on that trend, today we get a new look at the device from the other side: the glass front.
As picked up by MacRumors, Apple.pro--the same site that posted images of that neato iPod Nano with a built-in camera--has a shot of the iPad 3's front glass, or so it claims.
There's not a whole lot to look at here (see right) besides what Apple.pro notes to be a longer cable to connect to the device's main circuit board. The placement of the home button, as well as holes for the front-facing camera and ambient-light sensors, are also in the same places as the iPad 2, suggesting that no major physical changes are in store there.
Perhaps more noteworthy is Apple.pro's mention of the device's innards, which it says will include an "A5X" processor. That could simply be a parroting of shots that cropped up over the weekend depicting such a processor, but the site adds that the device will also get Apple's Siri voice assistant, a Retina Display, 1080p video recording on the built-in camera, and iOS 5.1.
This is the latest spy shot of an alleged iPad 3 part to crop up in recent months. Last week brought what could be the first shots of the display itself, which came from MacRumors and included a microscopic inspection to show that there were, in fact, more pixels in the same-size panel. Before that, it was shots of the aluminum back, which appeared twice before this weekend's shot of what appeared to be a fully assembled unit that looked very much like an iPad 2.
Apple is expected to introduce the iPad 3 in the first week of March, around the same time the company took the wraps off the iPad 2 last year. Multiple reports have pegged March as the month for the device's introduction, with other features hinted to include a quad-core processor and 4G LTE networking. For more, see CNET's iPad 3 rumor roundup.
