Apple iPad: review of reviews Along with the unmatched collection of 200,000 third-party programs designed for its large screen, and the large catalogs of music, books, periodicals and video content available for it, I can recommend the new iPad to consumers as their best choice in a general-purpose tablet. The exceptions would be people who prefer a smaller size for one-handed use, or those who find the weight a burden. While the weight gain was noticeable, I didn't find it a problem even for long reading or video-watching sessions. The extra thickness was barely discernible. For the weight conscious, and for those who can't swing the $499 entry cost, there is an out. Apple for the first time is making and selling the prior iPad model at a reduced price. Walt Mossberg, AllThingsD The Retina display will make you do a double-take the first time you see it. Even on the home screen, it's crisp and clear - you can notice a huge difference, even from the iPad 2. So what does that mean in practical terms for me as a user? Plenty. Especially for the way people use the iPad. Granted, I'm not much of a photographer, but when I'm editing pictures in iPhoto I like to be able to see what I'm doing. I want those edits to properly reflect what I'm seeing on the screen. With the Retina display, they do. Movies are the same - crystal clear and the colors are so vibrant. I can't think of any reason I wouldn't watch a movie on the iPad, especially when I'm traveling. I have my iTunes account and Netflix on the device, so movies are only a tap away. Jim Dalrymple, The Loop Dozens of would-be iPads have come - and, in many cases, gone. (Shall we have a moment of silence for the Hewlett-Packard TouchPad and the flailing BlackBerry PlayBook? Nah.) But the surviving rivals still sell in minuscule numbers compared with the iPad, and that's not likely to change now. The new iPad doesn't introduce anything that we haven't seen before, either in the iPhone or in rival tablets. There's no Steve Jobs "one more thing" moment here; Apple just took its white-hot iPad and added the latest screen, battery and cellular technologies. If you're in the market for a tablet, here's the bright side: For the same price as before, you can now get an updated iPad that's still better-looking, better integrated and more consistently designed than any of its rivals. David Pogue, New York Times Look, you either want an iPad or you don't. There's no pressure to buy one. But the Retina Display makes this so far and away the best release yet, this is a great time to climb aboard the iPad train. It certainly gets more right than wrong. The dedicated apps now number 200,000, way higher than rivals. The hardware remains gloriously well-designed and works with great efficiency. And an iPad is a gadget which quickly becomes essential, even though it stays luxurious. Seriously, what are you waiting for? David Phelan, Pocket Lint Playing the upcoming Infinity Blade: Dungeons, the polygonal-pushing experience is exceptional, with quality not far off what we've seen so far on the Sony PS Vita. There are multiple layers, complex shading, frenetic action and minimal slow down. Non-optimised games look pretty much identical to those on iPad 2, however. Will developers patch older games to bring them up to Retina standards? We'll see... Asus and Toshiba may be rubbing their hands in glee, with both having announced "proper" quadcore tabs in recent months. However, with the dedicated chip handling graphically intensive tasks, the dualcore A5X seems more than adequate, keeping the new iPad quick and slick, even when processing the likes of iPhoto and GarageBand. Luke Peters, T3 With this update, Apple wasn't as concerned about boosting the iPad's speed even further, because it had another, bigger problem to solve: Boosting the iPad's graphics capabilities so that it could update the 3.1 million pixels on its Retina display. Keep in mind, previous iPad screens only had about 786,000 pixels. Updating that many pixels requires a whole lot more graphics power just to keep things running as smoothly as before. That power comes from the X factor in the A5X processor - a new quad-core graphics engine. And sure enough, the third-generation iPad blows away every other iOS device in terms of graphics performance. In our tests using the GLBench 3D graphics testing app, the third-generation iPad could draw a complex 3D scene at the full frame rate of its display, 60 frames per second, without breaking a sweat. And in GLBench offscreen tests, which aren't constrained by the display's frame rate, the third-generation iPad had a frame rate 1.6 times that of the iPad 2 (and 13 times that of the original iPad). Going beyond pure graphics performance, my tests found the new iPad to be roughly the same speed as the old one. Jason Snell, Macworld Even iPhone apps look better - retina-display iPhone apps run at 2× size on the iPad 3 take advantage of their higher-resolution UI elements and text rendering. Non-retina iPhone apps look like a retro 8-bit video game at 2× on the iPad 3, but thankfully there aren't many of those left. It's not just sharp; the display also shows great bright colors without any saturation-gimmickry like you get with OLED displays. Photographs look amazingly good, but also amazingly true-to-life. It's no coincidence that iPhoto was chosen as the app to demo on stage and debut alongside the device. Photos don't just look sharp when zoomed out - they look sharp when zoomed in. The iPhone 4/4S can show print-quality photos at small sizes, but the new iPad can show print quality photos at hang-it-on-the-wall sizes. John Gruber, Daring Fireball