The Apple iPad 2 does impress with its much better performance, thinner form-factor and similar price compared to the first-gen tablet from Apple. But the second-generation slate from the company lacks radical improvements. It does not offer a package of features that will inevitably be available on competing devices and eventually on the iPad 3. The second-generation Apple iPad is definitely a device that is full of compromises. This is hardly something surprising. Firstly, Apple iPad is a product that Apple has been selling at below the company's usual profit margins in order to gain ground on the market it believes in. Secondly, Apple iPad is the first media tablet that became astonishingly successful and its maker needs to maintain the lead to make the successor not only bigger, but overwhelmingly bigger; thus, Apple needs to maintain the price-points, improve user experience, boost performance, enable new applications, but avoid costly innovative features. This is what was exactly done with the iPad 2. Unfortunately, not only the innovations disappeared from the final device, but Apple decided to cut even low-cost features that would have made the life of a typical user more comfortable. [ ... ]

The fierce competition between AMD and NVIDIA is about to get spicier with the introduction of genuinely high-end graphics cards from both companies. In the red corner, hailing from Toronto, Canada, and weighing in with a meaty punch is the AMD Radeon HD 6990 dual-GPU card, formerly known by the code-name Antilles. Fending off the Canuck beast is the job of the also-dual-GPU NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590, said to be primed for a mid-March launch. This means that both cards should be released to the press at roughly the same time. While confirmed specifications and release dates for both cards are still close-kept secrets, AMD is the first to bring its heavyweight contender to the public's critical gaze. Common sense dictates that the Radeon HD 6990 will take the form of two power-optimised HD 6970 GPUs on one PCB. Spitting out some conjectured numbers, this translates to a jaw-dropping 3,000-plus shaders, 4GB of onboard memory and 300GB/s of combined memory bandwidth: put that in your pipe and smoke it! [ ... ]

At the forthcoming CeBIT trade-show in Hannover, Germany, Advanced Micro Devices plans to demonstrate and announce its new microprocessors that will succeed the company's Phenom II central processing units (CPUs). Based on the program of CeBIT show, the company will show off the desktop versions of code-named Bulldozer chips. "The U.S.-based CPU and chip maker AMD will present at CeBIT 2011 processors, which performance exceeds the current top models of the Phenom-II series by 50%," the of official description of a CeBIT "theme and event" reads. In case AMD formally introduces its desktop processors based on Bulldozer micro-architecture code-named Zambezi at CeBIT, it will not be a big surprise as the company already used the show for formal introduction of important products and technologies in the previous years. The big question, however, is whether the company will initiate a review program for the new chips shortly after the show, will unveil official performance levels of the chip or will let select journalists to "independently" benchmark the new CPUs on site, a more than controversial move. [ ... ]