Apple announce new 12.9 inch iPad Pro and Stylus named Pencil

For those who think that the 9.7” iPad is not big enough, there is a double whammy from Apple. The new iPad Pro has a 12.9” retina display and Apple has announced new stylus named ‘Pencil’ that will, as of now, work only on the iPad Pro. The iPad Pro is powered by the new A9X chip and comes with a starting price of 799$ for 32gig, 949$ for 128GB and 1079$ for 128GB with LTE chip onboard. The  Apple Pencil will be priced at 99$. Both these devices will be available from the month of November. The current lineup of iPads are getting price cuts. iPad Mini 2 is priced at $269, iPad Mini 4 at $399, iPad Air at $399, iPad Air 2 at $499.

Apple has also announced a new type keyboard named ‘Smart Keyboard’ and this will be available for $169. The display on Apple’s new iPad Pro comes with 4:3 aspect ratio and its like stacking two iPad Air 2 tablets side by side in portrait orientation. This means that you can stack two iPad specific applications side by side and work on them. The display has a resolution of 2732 x 2048 pixel resolution. Thanks to the custom timing controller, photo alignment, variable refresh rate, the new display is not only has super accurate color reproduction, it can save battery by reducing the refresh rate when the content does not need full refresh rate. There are four speakers, one in each corner and this will provide stellar audio reproduction and thanks to the big display, the iPad Pro will soon be the favourite tablet for movie lovers.

The onboard battery can provide up to 10 hours of battery life, there is an 8mp iSight front facing camera, similar to previous gen iPads, the iPad Pro comes with TouchID fingerprint sensor and has 802.11ac MIMO Wi-Fi. The iPad Pro is 6.9mm thin and weighs 1.57 pounds. Coming to the CPU, the A9X chip has 2x memory bandwidth of A8X, 2x faster storage performance, 3rd gen 64-bit chip, is 1.8x faster than A8x CPU, 22 times faster than the first iPad, 2x faster graphics performance than the A8X, 360 times faster than first iPad. Apple goes on to say that due to the new A9X chip, the iPad Pro is faster than 80% of portable PCs at CPU intensive tasks and faster than 90% of PCs in gpu tasks.

Coming to the Pencil, unlinke those styluses available in the market, the Pencil is powered by a battery and comes with built-in pressure sensor. The Pencil is re-charged using lightning port that is hidden in tail end (remove the magnetic cap to reveal the lightning connector). With single charge, you get 12 hours of battery life and a 15 second charge will give 30 minutes of battery life. The sensors on Pencil does precise calculation as to how hard the tip of pencil is pressed down and draws thicker lines accordingly. A gentle touch results in super thin lines and the two tilt sensors in the tip calculate the orientation and angle in hand to help users create shading. The multi touch display on iPad Pro scans signal from Pencil at 240 times per second to provide super fast input via Pencil.

Technical Specification

• 12.9-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit widescreen Multi-Touch display
• 2732-by-2048 resolution at 264 pixels per inch (ppi)
• Fingerprint-resistant oleophobic coating
• Fully laminated display, Antireflective coating
• A9X chip with 64‑bit architecture
• M9 motion coprocessor
• 8MP iSight camera
  • ƒ/2.4 aperture
  • Five-element lens
  • Hybrid IR filter
  • Backside illumination
  • Panorama (up to 43MP)
  • 1080p HD video recording (30 fps)
  • Slo-mo (120 fps)
• 1.2mp FaceTime Camera
• 23 LTE bands support (for Wi-Fi + LTE model)
• Wi‑Fi (802.11a/​b/​g/​n/​ac); dual channel (2.4GHz and 5GHz); HT80 with MIMO
• Bluetooth 4.2 technology
• TouchID fingerprint sensor
• Built-in 38.5-watt-hour rechargeable lithium-polymer battery
• Up to 10 hours of surfing the web on Wi‑Fi, watching video, or listening to music
• Charging via power adapter or USB to computer system
• Wi-Fi + Cellular model: Up to 9 hours of surfing the web using cellular data network