If you were holding out for the iPad 3 that was, at one point, rumored to be coming out this fall, you may have to suspend your disbelief for another year.
Well-known rumor monger and Taiwanese newspaper DigiTimes on Tuesday called foul about a February TechCrunch article, which speculated that the Apple iPad 3 was coming out this fall.
Citing upstream component makers, DigiTimes wrote, "Since Apple just released its iPad 2 in early March and is ready to start mass shipping, launching the iPad 3 would simply bite off share from its iPad 2."
Furthermore, despite rumors about Apple using a brighter, higher-resolution Active-Matrix Organic Light-Emitting Diode AMOLED display screen typically found in Samsung smartphones, DigiTimes said Apple was still in the "initial planning stage," which makes it even less likely we'll see an iPad 3 this fall. Another point DigiTimes makes is that since Samsung dominates the supply of AMOLED panel technologies, Apple would be taking a major risk. Last September Samsung began using a new generation of AMOLED displays, called "super AMOLED," which were questionably worse than the iPhone 4's LCD. PCMag pointed out an even simpler explanation in February: it doesn't fit with Apple's typical product cycle.
On Monday, Gartner predicted that Apple's tablet dominance with iPads will last until at least 2015. After capturing 83.9 percent of the media tablet market in 2010, Apple should see its market share decline steadily over time as rivals finally come to market. But Google's Android-based tablets won't begin to match Apple's iPad numbers until 2015, when Apple will have 47.1 percent to Android's 38.6 percent.