Silverman: The screen's the thing on new iPad

When I reviewed the original iPad two years ago, my biggest beef was with the display. Text on it was cursed with the "jaggies" - there weren't enough pixels on the screen to make characters look smooth. A year later, the sleeker and faster iPad 2 didn't fix that problem. Sure, the screen was brighter and its colors richer, but the pixel count hadn't gone up. Here was a new iPad, beset with the same blurry text as the first. Last week, Apple began selling its third-generation tablet, which it has opted to call simply iPad. The third time is the charm: Apple has improved the screen in a big way - so much so that it's the star of this year's show. The new iPad has a display with a 2,048-by-1,536-pixel resolution. The previous two generations had a resolution of 1,024-by-768. This gives this 9.7-inch screen more pixels than the HDTVs that sit in many living rooms. The result is certifiably jaw-dropping. This is the biggest difference in the new iPad, but it's hardly the only change. I'll talk more about the display in a minute, but there are some other things you'll want to know. Apple has equipped the new iPad with the optional ability to connect to newer, faster 4G LTE networks from Verizon and AT&T. As with the earlier models, which worked with slower 3G networks, it's still a pay-as-you go deal - you only need to buy data access if you need it, and there's no contract. Both carriers' networks are very fast. In some cases they easily beat residential broadband connections. They're also expensive. The least you'll pay is AT&T's base rate of $15 for a piddling 250 megabytes, or $20 for 1 gigabyte from Verizon, but you could pay as much as $50 a month for 5 gigabytes of data from both carriers. The new model also has a much better camera than the one that came in the iPad 2, which was so poor it was considered something of a joke. (The original iPad didn't have a camera at all.) The rear camera on the new iPad has 5 megapixels, like the iPhone 4, but has some of the optical features found in the superior iPhone 4S. The front camera, which is mainly designed for use with Apple's FaceTime video-calling, is unchanged. There's a beefed-up chip inside, Apple's own dual-core A5X, and a quad-core graphics processor. The zippier graphics contribute to an overall performance boost. The new iPad feels more responsive than the iPad 2, and some processor-intensive things - such as rendering video - take significantly less time. Although the new iPad doesn't include Siri, the personal assistant on the iPhone 4S, it does offer Dictation, which converts speech to text almost anywhere you can type. It is remarkably accurate, and I find myself using it more and more. However, it requires an Internet connection. With a pixel-packed screen, 4G connectivity and faster graphics, the iPad should have worse battery life, but Apple has bulked up the size of the battery to compensate, which makes the new tablet a bit thicker and heavier. In my tests, the battery life was comparable to the iPad 2 and better than the iPad 1. iPad 2 users will, however, notice the increased weight. Now, back to the screen. If you've got an iPad 1 and use it to read e-books, websites and content in apps and you're not happy with the way text looks on it - run, do not walk, to buy one of these. This is a vast improvement, and finally makes good on the promise inherent in tablet computers. This is the way the iPad's display always should have looked. Of course, the higher resolution improves more than text. Photos have more detail and you can now watch full, 1080p HD movies on the iPad. Even small, simple things look better. For example, there's a dialog box that pops up when you use the iPad's built-in ability to post a Twitter update. I'd never noticed it before, but the text field has a paper texture to it. It's very clear on the new iPad, but not at all obvious on the original. The new iPad costs the same as previous models. The base version, with 16 gigabytes of storage and able to connect to Wi-Fi only, is $499. The 32-GB model is $599 and the 64-GB one is $699. You can get all three with optional LTE connectivity, which adds $130. These changes keep the iPad the leader among tablets. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for competitors to offer a screen with this resolution for this price.