Last night (Mar 7 in San Francisco), Apple's CEO Tim Cook annouced the thrid generation of its best-selling tablet. But instead of labeling it as the iPad 3 as rumors projected, it was introduced as "the new iPad," just like when they introduce the new iPod, iMac or MacBook.

Despite looking exactly the same as iPad 2, the new iPad features:

1. 9.7-inch Retina display (as sharp as the iPhone 4s) featuring 2,048 x 1,536 pixels.
2. A quad-core A5X processing unit that runs up to fourttimes faster.
3. A 5MP iSight camera.
4. 1080p full HD video camera
5. iOS 5.1 together with Siri (which now speaks a few more languages, including Japanese)
6. 4G LTE compatability for faster downloads.

The new iPad will be available from Mar 16 in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Puerto Rico, Singapore, Switzerland, UK, USA and US Virgin Islands. Prices start from US$499 for the 16GB Wi-Fi and US$629 for the 16GB Wi-Fi + 4G

The second round of releases will be Mar 23, and includes a further 26 countries--and Thailand is not on that list. That means it could be 1-2 months before the iPad hits iStudio shelves in Bangkok.

Got family traveling to civilized countries any time soon? Get them to bring it back. Or even better, get an iPad 2, which is now only US$399 for a 16GB Wi-Fi and US$529 for a 16GB Wi-Fi + 3G.

www.apple.com/ipad