Back before the iPad 2 made its grand debut, the rumor mill was churning with claims that Apple's second tablet may sport a higher resolution, Retina-type display. Ultimately those rumors proved fruitless, but now there are reports claiming that the iPad 3 could be the first iOS slate with an improved display. After digging around in the iOS 5 beta, a Techunwrapped source discovered images in the Twitter.framework portion of the SDK that had a resolution of 1536x2048, twice that of the current iPad's 768x1024 display. Similar higher-res images have also been discovered buried inside the Newsstand app.
So does this all mean that the next iPad will have a Retina display? On the one hand, the appearance of these images in iOS 5-specific apps could suggest that Apple's at least considering bumping up the iPad 3's resolution. As I pointed out earlier, though, many claimed that the iPad 2 would have a higher-res display before the device was released. There were even some double-sized, 1536x2048 images discovered in iBooks. Ultimately, it's probably still a little too early to make a decision one way or the other about the possibility of an iPad 3 Retina display, but it's definitely looking like a possibility.
