Ok… it’s rather unlikely that they even saw my old story, but back in June of 2010, I wrote an article titled ‘I’m dying for Dial Keys on the iPad‘, the gist of which was that Apple should add a split-keyboard to the iPad to make it thumb-typeable. I used Dial Keys, an old ultra mobile PC program, to make a mockup of a split keyboard on the iPad, but it won’t be until nearly a year later, with the coming iOS 5 update, that Apple will add such a keyboard to the iPad.

I remember prior to the announcement of the first-generation iPad, back when it was just rumors and speculation, I was hoping that if Apple released a slate, they’d do something that would improve the typing experience on such a large device.

Apple totally revolutionized touchscreen typing with the original iPhone by equipping it with a much more responsive capacitive touchscreen, and programming a very smart on-screen keyboard (OSK). I wanted Apple to revolutionize large touchscreen typing in the same way that they did on the smartphone, but unfortunately that didn’t happen at launch and we were stuck with a sub-par typing experience on the device (I think I can type faster on my iPhone than on the iPad).

Once I got the iPad in my hands, I was still wishing for a form of split-keyboard because thumb-typing in portrait required an annoying stretch, and thumb-typing in landscape was near impossible (which meant you couldn’t effectively type without setting the iPad on some surface)

Apple is finally adding a split keyboard to the iPad with the iOS 5 update (coming this fall).

Apple’s implementation is smart because it allows you to place the keyboard anywhere along the screen, which means you place it toward the center to balance the weight of the device.

One of my complaints with the Xoom is that typing in portrait is annoying because the keyboard is at the bottom of the screen, then you’ve got the weight of the rest of the device working as leverage against your hands (this is exacerbated by the 16:9 ratio of the device). Needless to say, holding all that weight while typing with your thumbs is not an ideal experience. Placing the keyboard toward the center of the screen, I thought as I used the Xoom, would make the weight a non-issue.

The split keyboard on the iPad will work in both landscape and portrait modes, and can be split or recombined on-the-fly without having to dig through the Settings app.

For a company that invented the product that is the namesake of the term, Apple has done a paltry job of handling podcasting on iOS devices.

While iOS 5 undoubtedly added a lot of features that people have been wanting for a long time, I’m sorry to say that podcasting management appears to be as awful as ever in Apple’s latest version of the mobile OS.

For the uninitiated, podcasts are essentially internet radio shows. They are recorded, then offered up for download, generally on a scheduled basis. Apple’s very own iTunes is home to a huge number of podcasts that you can ‘subscribe’ to, but that doesn’t mean much.

The whole idea of a podcast is that you can subscribe to it, then get the episodes as they are released, rather than having to search around to find out if there’s a new episode.

You can actually access any of the podcasts that iTunes offers directly through the iTunes application on any iOS device, but it’s up to you to check back to find out when a new episode has been appeared, and you have to download each episode manually.

If you want to get your podcasts in a semi-automated way, you’ll have to subscribe to the podcast through iTunes on the desktop, then keep checking back to find out when a new episode has been found, then sync your iOS device to iTunes to get the latest episode. This doesn’t really solve any of the problems though (and might even be less useful then checking manually on the device itself).

Is it so much to ask that Apple allow me to subscribe to a podcast directly on my iPhone, then allow my iPhone to not only check automatically for new episodes, but download them without my intervention?

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to wake up and see a notification on your homescreen: “A new episode of your favorite podcast is ready for listening inch, then with a simple tap you could begin the podcast along with your morning routine? This sort of functionality is long overdue.

It seems really simple, but Apple has not taken podcasting very seriously (probably because Apple doesn’t make any money from podcasts).

iOS 5 is removing the need for a PC or Mac to set up and manage an iOS device. However, this means that people who choose to operate their devices in that way will lose out on the only (limited) podcast subscription support that Apple offers. They won’t even be able to sync the latest episodes from their computer, so their only option will be manually digging around, or using a third-party application (which can’t download new episodes in the background).

Perhaps with a little push, we can get Apple to get serious about podcasts with iOS 5. I’m talking: automatic checking/downloading, on-device subscriptions, the whole bit. A bonus would be if the place where you left off while listening would be synced to all of your devices through iCloud so you could pick up where you left off on any one of them.

With serious podcast functionality, I’d finally be able to easily keep up with Chippy and the guys making the great Meet:Mobility podcast!

Yesterday at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), Steve Jobs took the stage to talk about iOS 5 and iCloud. Going against tradition since the first iPhone was announced, WWDC didn’t see the announcement of the latest iPhone hardware. We did, however, see the latest changes coming in iOS 5 and see the announcement of Apple’s new iCloud service. Before we get into it, you should know that consumers will see iOS 5 released to existing devices this Fall. iOS 5 will support the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPod Touch (3rd and 4th generation), iPad, and iPad 2. Or you can jump in on some beta action early if you download the latest version of iTunes and are running the very latest version of iOS (4.3.3).

As a long-time iPhone user and current iPhone 4 user, Apple’s announcements fell into two categories for me: 1) Useful new stuff, 2) It’s about time. And I think this is exactly how I’ll present them:

Useful New Stuff:

This is a new app from Apple which everyone is equating to the BBM service on BlackBerrys. Simply put, iMessage is a messaging application for any iOS device. It’ll run on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch, and allow those devices to communicate by sending text, photos, or video messages (Apple TV runs iOS, but there’s no mention of it being compatible with iMessage).

Apple is only going to strengthen it’s hold on this area of the market with this new app as people are encouraged to pick an iOS device over the competition because it means that they’ll be able to communicate quite seamlessly with friends that already have iOS devices.

Unlike SMS, you’ll be able to see delivery and read notifications as your recipients receive and read the messages that you’ve sent. You’ll also be able to see when friends are in the midst of composing replies to your messages if you happen to have the conversation open as they are typing. Conversations will also be synced between all of your iOS devices which is definitely handy.

Newsstand is two things. First, it’s an icon on the homescreen that will open a custom folder view to show any magazines or newspapers that you’ve subscribed to. The latest issues will be downloaded automatically in the background and updated on the bookshelf-style interface.

Second, Newsstand is a place where all newspaper and magazine apps can be found in one place so that customers can easily browse and subscribe; just hit the Store button right on the open Newsstand.

Reminders is a new application that that allows the user to create ToDo lists. This would be boring if not for some nifty options surrounding individual items on the list.

You can associate tasks with dates as you’d expect, but more interestingly you can also associate them with locations. You could, for instance, set a reminder to pick up some groceries on the way home from work. You do this by specifying a location along with the task, then you can ask it to remind you when you are entering that location or leaving that location (in this case you’d obviously select leaving).

Reminders will be synced across all of your iOS devices.

New four-finger gestures that Apple has had in the works for some time are now going to be available on the iPad in the consumer release of iOS 5. You can now pinch with four fingers to get back to the Home Screen, swipe up with four fingers to reveal the app switcher, or swipe left/right to switch quickly between apps. This will certainly increase the speed of app navigation as you will be able to leave your hand right on the screen rather than having to reach over to tap or double-tap the Home button.

Apple introduced display mirroring to an HDTV with the iPad 2 but it required a $40 wired dongle to make it happen. If you’ve got an Apple TV, you can now mirror the iPad 2’s display to your HDTV wirelessly. Display mirroring is exactly as it sounds… you’ll see exactly what’s shown on the iPad 2 while using this feature (including support for both orientations).

This will no doubt be excellent for sharing photos from the device rather than having everyone crowd around the computer.

Apple says it’ll work great for games too, but after seeing some videos of wireless display mirroring in action, it doesn’t look like it’ll respond fast enough to use the HDTV as the primary display for gaming (ie: it’ll have no problem showing the image, but the lag will mean that you’ll want look at the iPad 2’s display while playing, rather than the HDTV).

It’s About Time:

Just about a year ago, I tweeted, “Apple, you better not make us wait until iOS 5.0 for a decent notification system. It is NOT fun playing Sherlock when your phone vibrates. inch

Unfortunately this came true.

Ever since notifications existed in iOS, they’ve been annoying and difficult to handle. Notifications would always pop-up right in the middle of whatever you were currently working on, and you had to deal with them (by either dismissing or acting upon them) until you could get back to work. The irony is that iOS has been the best mobile OS when it comes to receiving notifications, thanks to a great push system, but when it came to actually organizing those notifications, iOS failed pretty hard.

Apple is finally fixing this, and they’ve stolen a page directly from Android and perhaps at least one jailbreak developer.

The new notification center is accessed by pulling the menu down from the menu bar, just like on Android. It’ll organize all of your notifications and give you access to them on the lock-screen as well.

Notifications will no longer pop-up in your face, but rather they will have a mostly non-intrusive animation from the top of the screen that alerts you to their presence. You can click on the notification to go straight to the app that sent it, or you can leave it alone and it’ll go away shortly without bothering you.

From the lock-screen, you’ll be able to go straight to the applications that sent the notifications by swiping the icon to the left, similar to the unlock slider.

It would appear as though some visual flair has been lifted quite directly from the great jailbreak app, LockInfo, which I’ve been using for at least a year now to supplement Apple’s awful notification management:

To be fair, Apple did file some lock-screen related patents as far back as 2008 that look quite similar to their current implementation, so whether or not it’s right to call them out for stealing the LockInfo aesthetic all together is still up in the air. Regardless, properly managed notifications in iOS is going to be beneficial to a huge number of people.

Apple hasn’t said whether or not notifications will be synced through iCloud (more on that below), which is concerning because there’s nothing more annoying than sitting on the couch at the end of the day with an iPad that’s filled with notifications that you’ve already read on your iPhone.

Apple has finally decided to get onboard with native Twitter integration. You’ll sign in to Twitter just once within the OS, then third-party applications will be able to ask you for permission to use your Twitter account (similar to how they can ask to use your location data).

Apple will let you Tweet directly from Safari, Camera, YouTube, and Maps, but I’ve got a feeling that people will be quick to say “not enough! inch and be begging for a gesture that let’s them compose a tweet from anywhere in the OS (expect this to be quickly added by jailbreak developers, if Apple doesn’t already add it by the time iOS 5 launches in the Fall).

In addition to auto-suggesting users that you are mentioning, you’ll be able to sync your Twitter contacts to your Address Book, which will append Twitter usernames and pictures to your contacts if you choose. You can also attach a location to any one of your tweets. It also appears as though multiple Twitter accounts will be supported.

Looks like we’ll have to wait until iOS 6 for Facebook integration. I guess Apple can only handle one social network per update.

Apple quickly pulled the Camera+ app from the App Store last year when it included a hidden feature that would allow users to use the volume button on their iPhone as a shutter button for the camera. Apple never allows third-party developers to alter hardware button usage, but naturally, Apple isn’t bound by it’s own App Store rules.

Camera enhancements in iOS 5 include the aforementioned ability to snap photos using the volume-up button while you’re in the Camera app and the ability to access the camera from a single button on the lockscreen.

Unlike the sliding gestures used to access notifications and unlock the device from the lockscreen, the camera access button appears to only require one tap. This is somewhat odd as the sliding gesture is used to prevent accidental unlocks while the phone is in your pocket. Accidentally tapping the camera button on the lockscreen would put the phone into the camera app and possibly even start snapping photos which would be a huge waste of battery. I’m surprised Apple isn’t using a slide gesture for quick camera access.

You’ll also be able to use a much more intuitive pinch-zoom gesture to zoom while shooting photos, rather than having to tap on the screen (initiating a refocus) in order to bring up the zoom bar. There’s also grid-lines to help with photo composition and the ability to lock focus and exposure which is actually the reason I purchased the Camera+ app a few months back.

Apple is finally adding basic photo editing to iOS. While you once had to find a third-party application to modify your photos in any way, now you can crop, fix red-eye, use one-touch photo enhance, and hopefully you’ll be able to rotate as well.

Along with performance improvements, Apple is finally adding tabbed browsing to the iPad. Prior to iOS 5, you had to hit a button in menu bar, then select your site from a list of thumbnails, and watch as it animated back up to your screen. This was way too slow. I’ve been using Atomic Web for more than a year now, primarily because of it’s quick tab switching through gestures and tabs.

I can’t believe it’s taken Apple this long to catch on and realize that the old way of switching was painfully slow. Now you’ll be able to tap on tabs to quickly switch your page and drag to reorganize tabs.

Sadly, it doesn’t look as though tabbed browsing will come to non-iPad versions of Safari, which means I’ll definitely still be using (and recommending that others use) Atomic Web on my iPhone.

They’ve also added Reader and Reading List.

Reader will take text and photos from a website and reformat them to be easier to read. This’ll also cut out all of the extraneous stuff like ads and irrelevant graphics. Additionally, Reader will combine multi-page articles into one continuous page for easy reading without interruptions.

Reading List is a short-term bookmark list which will sync across devices. You’ll be able to add/remove items to the Reading List on any device that supports Safari, including on PC or Mac. Syncing means that you’ll easily be able to queue up items on your PC that you may want to read later on your iPhone.

Since the beginning of iOS history, you’ve had to plug your new device into a PC or Mac to set it up. Apple is finally moving the setup process to the device itself.

This has much larger implications than it might seem. This change is paving the way for iOS devices to become the only devices that a user might own.

For people like you and me, it’s unlikely that we’ll be rocking out an iOS device as our only computing device. For people like my 84 year old great-aunt, who recently bought and iPad 2, this feature would be perfect. While my aunt doesn’t really understand how to use a traditional Mac or PC, she’s grasping the iPad 2 surprisingly well, and using it for things like email and FaceTime. She doesn’t own a computer, so her son had to set it up for her. Once iOS 5 hits the streets, iOS devices will be able to setup and update directly on the device, making them completely free of any computer dependency.

Older folks aren’t the only people that this change will benefit. Apple is also looking at other parts of the world where the majority of households don’t own a PC or Mac. This change will now allow such households to purchase an iOS device and set it up as their only computing device. Very cool, and certainly beneficial to the sales of iOS devices and customers alike.

People have been asking, nay, begging for this one since the iPhone was released. You’ll finally be able to sync your iDevice to your computer over WiFi instead of having to plug in.

Apple also says that they’ll automatically sync and backup your device over WiFi once per day which will be undoubtedly useful.

Somewhat hilariously, Apple is finally allowing some simple text formatting within their mail application (though I suppose most other mobile OSs are doing this yet). You’ll be able to bold, underline, and italicize text through the pop-up highlight menu. Additionally, you’ll be able to adjust indents and drag email addresses between the To:, Cc:, and Bcc: fields.

More useful is the ability to create and delete inbox folders directly on the device. There’s also now a flagging capability to mark/star important messages that you want to come back to.

Apple is also finally adding the ability to search the body of email messages whereas they used to only let you search by sender/recipient/subject which was a serious joke (I use Gmail as my provider and I’d always load up the web client if I needed to search).

iCloud

I’m not putting iCloud in either of the above categories. On one hand, I think the type of functionality that it aims to provide has been desired for a long time, but it wasn’t necessarily practical or expected.

Apple has made some major investments in data centers over the last few years and they believe that they have the capability to scale iCloud to the more than 200 million iOS devices that have been sold so far.

iCloud aims to automatically keep all of your devices in sync with one another. Apple is putting a big emphasis on seamlessness and autonomy. Jobs pulled out the phrase “it just works inch more than once during his WWDC keynote.

The first thing you should know about iCloud is that it is free. iCloud is supplanting the MobileMe service that Apple used to charge a yearly subscription for.

iCloud functionality is built into a number of apps and ties your devices together with your Apple ID. iCloud generally serves the same purpose for all the apps we’ll talk about: keeping everything in sync.

For instance, Apple is touting a feature called Photo Stream for the photos app. Photo stream is a rolling list of 1000 of your most recent photos. Take a photo on your iPhone and it will be sent up to iCloud then sent down to all of your iOS devices (including iPhoto on the Mac, or the Pictures folder on Windows). This will only happen over WiFi. On Mac or PC, all of your photos will be stored, rather than just the last 1000.

On your other devices (including Apple TV), you can open the Photos app and you’ll find an album called Photo Stream where your last 1000 photos taken with any of your devices will be stored. You can add the photos that you want to keep for good into permanent albums on the device which will sent sync across all of your devices.

iCloud itself will store any photos that you’ve taken in the last 30 days, which Apple says will be more than enough time for your iDevices to connect to iCloud and download them.

Once you understand this model, it’s easy to see how most of the other apps will work with iCloud.

iTunes, for instance, will work with iCloud to distribute any songs that you purchase to all of your devices. If you buy a song through iTunes on your PC or Mac, you’re iPad and iPhone will automatically download it without requiring any bothersome iTunes syncing.

You’ll also be able to look at your history of previously purchased music and download anything that you’ve previously purchased to any of your devices.

Other apps that support iCloud are:

• App Store
• iBooks
• Documents (iWork apps)
• Contacts
• Calendar
• Mail

And they all work very similarly… make a change on one device, it’ll travel through the cloud and find it’s way to your other devices.

If iCloud works the way that Apple says it will, it’s going strengthen the desire to purchase more than one iOS device. I’m almost wishing that I still had my iPad hearing about all of the iCloud functionality.

iCloud also backs up the following daily:

• Purchased music, apps, books
• Photos and video in the camera roll
• Device settings
• App data
• Home screen and app organization
• SMS and MSS
• Ringtones

Apple says that restoring a backup to a device is as easy as plugging in your Apple ID (and presumably waiting quite a while as everything downloads).

Apple is also offering app developers APIs that will allow them to send data through iCloud. For instance, it could be possible for game-saves to be uploaded to iCloud and sent to other devices to allow you to continue your game of Plants vs. Zombies where you left off.

iTunes Match

Apple also introduced a new service called iTunes Match. For an annual fee of $25, Apple will scan your library for music that hasn’t been purchased through iTunes and afford that music all of the benefits of iTunes-purchased music (which means making all of that music available to any of your devices, and backing it up).

Any songs that they can’t scan and match will be uploaded to iCloud and become available to any of your devices.

Apple is also offering to upgrade any lower quality music to decent quality 256Kbps AAC for no extra fee.

iOS 5 is bringing adding a lot of features that should have been there for a long time, and iCloud is adding a lot of features that are going to seriously automate the content management of their iDevices. This is certainly impressive considering that Apple is offering iCloud for free, and Android and other mobile operating systems are going to have a harder time convincing the average consumer to pick up devices that aren’t iOS based thanks to these new features.

The recently released Photosynth app for iOS is an impressive and effective (and free!) tool for making high-quality interactive panoramic photos directly on your mobile device.

The Photosynth project is the brainchild of Microsoft Live Labs. It started as a neat service that was capable of combining hundreds of photographs from similar areas and allowing the user to virtually fly around to each photo. Later, support for uploading traditional panoramic photos and creating interactive ones from your desktop came online. Now they’ve unleashed an awesome new app for creating mobile interactive “fishbowl inch panoramic images.

The free app is available from Apple’s App Store for the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPad 2, and fourth generation iPod Touch, and it’s a joy to use.

Yes, you read right. While Microsoft is indeed the company behind Windows Phone 7, they’ve actually opted to make this app for iOS instead of their own mobile OS. This is similar to what we saw when they released Seadragon (now Zoom.it), another interesting photo-related app from Live Labs, for iOS several years ago.

Fire up Photosynth and the app will guide you in creating your first panoramic image. When you being making the image, you’ll see the world through the lens of your iPhone or iPod Touch’s camera, and as you move the camera the app will track the scene and automatically take images as they are needed. You are essentially building a virtual sphere around you by capturing images. The goal is to move the green circle in the center of the screen until it is on one of the dashed lines (which represents the boundary of images that you’ve already captured). This will cause a new photo to be snapped. Rinse and repeat as much as you’d like, then render the scene. If the algorithms used for scene tracking temporarily have some trouble, you’ll see the frame turn red. Just turn back to facing an area that you’ve already snapped, and it’ll pick things back up in no time.

I could write 10 pages of text about how it works and you still probably wouldn’t understand it as well as if you just saw it. Fortunately, we’ve got this wonderful new technology called “video inch which actually allows you to watch a series of photos that gives the illusion of movement, and thus we can share with you what it’s like to use this app! Check it out:

Once you capture a synth, you can upload it to the Photosynth website to share with the world (or you can leave it unlisted so that only those with the link can find it). What’s more, you can view fishbowl panoramics that are on your device, or load and view those that you have already created and are on your Photosynth account. Support for viewing (but not creation of) traditional panoramic photos (‘flat’ single-file images like jpg, png, bmp, etc.). Here’s what you can expect to see as output:

http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=4f67232d-6821-44c1-8caa-089eb4e5f54c

Photosynth has brought some incredible ease of use to the world of panoramic creation, and they’ve packed a lot of good functionality into this app in the incredible price of free.

My critiques of the app are few. In accordance with Apple’s App Store rating system, my current rating would be a 4/5 (it would be a 5/5 if I wasn’t so picky). From my use so far, it doesn’t seem as though the app is stitching full-resolution photos. It is likely using lower resolution shots which means less quality when you zoom in. This is probably a technical limitation (the phone only has so much RAM to hold photos before the pano is rendered and saved), but it could also potentially be a bug that was inherited from a limitation on the iPhone 3GS’s lower resolution camera (I’m using an iPhone 4 in this case).

My other complaint is that there is no indication as to which panoramic you’ve already shared to Facebook. If I have a group of them that I’d like to upload, I have to go through and upload each individually. Sometimes I’ll forget my place and then I have to wonder if I’ve already posted one of the panos or not. There’s also no twitter integration which would be nice!

Still, very well done, team Live Labs!

For a platform that regularly takes flak for not being able to multitask, it looks like iOS is way ahead of the game when it comes to quick switching between apps.

As of iOS 4.3, four and five finger gestures are being added to the software. Using them, you can easily slide back and forth between running apps, pull up the quick-switch menu, and jump back to the home screen.

Oddly they are currently locked for developer use only, but that hasn’t stopped non-developers from enabling them.

Our friends over at GottaBeMobile.com have a guide that shows you how to unlock the gestures on any iPad (original, or the new one) running iOS 4.3. Unfortunately you’ll need a Mac, and it’ll run you $5.99, but it almost looks worth it; check out the video of the gorgeously animated gestures in action:

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The gestures are certainly more quick and natural than having to double tap the home button, then tap and on-screen element to switch apps. And while they may be natural in terms of execution, they lack initial intuitiveness. Until they are taught the first time, it isn’t straight forward to try four or five finger gestures.

There’s also the question of  whether or not implementing these gestures will limit developers. In multiplayer games like Harbor Master, you can have multiple people docking ships at once. In MultiPong, four player mode requires that each player have a finger on the screen at once. It’s possible that iOS might interpret the movement of four individuals’ fingers as a single four-finger gesture, and that would really wreak havoc on the game experience if you’re defending your goal with a paddle then suddenly switching to another app!

If I had to guess, I’d say that this is why Apple hasn’t yet enabled the gesture for all. They probably need to give developers time to specifically disable such gestures in apps that would be ruined in some way if an improper four or five-finger gesture was detected.

The iPad 2 is here! Are you surprised? Probably not. Apple is quite consistent with it’s product iterations. There’s nothing mind-blowing about the iPad 2, but it’s definitely set the new bar for tablets. Here’s the low-down:

Specs:

• iOS 4.3
• 9.7 inch capacitive glass screen with oleophobic (fingerprint resistant) coating @ 1024 x 768
• Dual-core Apple A5 CPU @ 1GHz
• Enhanced GPU that Apple claims is 9x faster
• 16/32/64GB memory options
• Forward-facing camera (with FaceTime support, naturally) @ 640×480 resolution
• Rear camera for up to 720p (1280×720) video recording
• Sensors: Gyroscope, accelerometer, light sensor, digital compass
• WiFi a/b/g/n & Bluetooth 2.1
• 3G & GPS (optional)
• 25 watt-hour battery
• White or black bezel options

Dimensions & Weight (and size comparisons):

The iPad 2 is 9.5 x 7.31 x 0.34 inches or 241.2 x 185.7 x 8.8 mm. That’s right, the iPad 2 is ridiculously thin, probably the thinnest tablet on the market. It’s even more thin than the iPhone 4 (9.3 mm).

Here is the iPad 2’s size visualized against two other 10 inch tablets, and the original iPad:

The iPad 2 is also a bit lighter than the original iPad: 1.33 pounds (601g) vs. 1.5 pounds (680g). Here’s how its weight stacks up to the competition:

Weight was one of my major complaints in my iPad review, so it’s nice to see that they’ve been able to bring it down somewhat. Still, as Chippy noted on twitter earlier, they fell short of the important 1 pound mark.

Design

The design of the iPad 2 isn’t far off from the original, though they’ve reshaped it to make it much more like the latest generation of iPod Touch.

Specifically, they’ve flattened the dome shape on the back of the iPad, but still let the edges taper up to the sides of the device. This eliminates one of the surfaces, so now you’ve essentially got just a front and back with a smooth transition between, rather than individual sides. Keeping the sides rounded means you’ll be able to get your fingers under the device to pick it up, but the overall width of the iPad 2 has been reduced over the original.

Thanks to Apple’s iPad 2 video, we got to see some cool shots of the device’s insides. Check it out below:

Continue reading on page 2 (Cameras, CPU, GPU, & Battery Life, Display Mirroring & AirPlay, iOS 4.3)…