Apple A5

Apple Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Philip Schiller is now live on stage at the company’s special media event in California, and he just unveiled the new iPad mini.

“The iPad mini is every inch an iPad,” announced Schiller.

The iPad mini is the much-rumored smaller tablet from Apple, and it just debuted at 7.9 inches and .68 pounds.

“It’s as light as a pad of paper,” Schiller added.

The new Apple-branded tablet boasts a 1,024-by-768-pixel resolution, like the previous-generation 9.7-inch iPad models, but it has a 7.2mm-thick aluminum shell that is 53 percent lighter and 23 percent thinner. The iPad mini also has a dual-core Apple A5 processor, a 5-megapixel iSight camera, 802.11n Wi-Fi, LTE capability, Lightning connector, and a 10-hour battery life. The base model

Full iPad mini specs:

• Comes in Wi-FI and Wi-Fi+ Cellular models
• 7.2mm thick— 23 percent thinner, “as thin as a pencil,” etc.
• 53 percent lighter, 0.68 lbs, “as light as a pad of paper,” etc.
• Colors: black with slate, white with silver
• 7.9-inch diagonal
• Exact same pixels as previous-generation iPad: 1,024-by-768—all software works unchanged 
  
• 163 pixels per inch (ppi)
• Bezels: made of aluminum, where as Android is plastic (Schiller comparing iPad mini to Nexus 7)
• FaceTime HD camera: 1.2MP photos, 720p HD video, FaceTime video calling over Wi-Fi or cellular, Face detection, Backside illumination
• 5MP iSight camera: 5MP photos, Autofocus, Face detection, Backside illumination, Five-element lens, Hybrid IR filter, ƒ/2.4 aperture
• Video recording: 1080p HD video recording, Video stabilization, Face detection, and Backside illumination
• 802.11a/b/g/n, Ultrafast LTE wireless
• Battery: Built-in 16.3-watt-hour rechargeable lithium-polymer battery, charging via power adapter or USB to computer system, 10 hours of battery life (ad: “largest and thinnest single-cell battery we have ever designed”)
• Dual-core A5
• Lightning connector, 3.5-mm stereo headphone minijack, built-in speaker, microphone
• Supports AirPlay Mirroring to Apple TV (second and third-generation) at 720p and AirPlay video streaming to Apple TV (third-generation) at up to 1080p and Apple TV (second-generation) at up to 720p
• Get more details at Apple’s website.

Go to 9to5Mac’s full coverage of the iPad mini for more information on pricing and availability.

An image gallery is below.

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDBHXbwgdc4]

Hacker Pod2g posted an interesting video this morning on his blog that shows a working untethered jailbreak performed on the iPhone 4S with iOS 5.0.1. It runs without a hiccup and the device easily reboots after the jailbreak without needing to tether it to a computer. The video is credited to Dustin Howett, a Chronic Dev Team member.

According to Pod2g, with “only a few to wait now,” an untethered jailbreak for iPhone 4S and iPad 2 is around the corner. The video demonstration follows a flurry of Twitter activity last week that indicated that jailbreak community is now close to releasing a jailbreak solution for A5-driven iOS devices running iOS 5.0.1. Note that an untethered jailbreak for non-A5 devices running iOS 5.0.1 has been available since the end of 2011.

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Floorplan comparison: Apple’s A4 chip (left) and the latest A5 processor (right)

Reverse engineering wizards over at Chipworks put the A5 chip under a microscope. Yes, it’s a Samsung – confirming our hunch. The experts came to this conclusion by putting the chip under a microscope and examining dielectric layers and the shape of the transistor gates. The teardown analysis also revealed a die almost twice the size of the A4 chip from the previous-generation iPad and iPhone 4, the 45-nanometer manufacturing process and other interesting tidbits.

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