I got a London call last week from Bob Apfel, a Brooklyn neighbor (and fellow Oberlin College graduate).<p>

"Two weeks ago," he began. "I completed the debt restructuring of Greece."

Based on current progress of development, there will be 32 Windows 8 tablet PCs launched by Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Lenovo, Acer, Asustek Computer and Toshiba by the end of 2012, the sources indicated.</p><p> In particular, Lenovo and Acer plan to launch Windows 8 tablet PCs priced at US$300-1,000, with entry-level models to be sold at below US$300 for competition with Android tablet PCs and models offered by China-based white-box vendors, and models at over US$300 to challenge iPad, including the new iPad and a next-generation iPad, the sources claimed.

Toshiba’s new Excite line, which the Japanese electronics maker is officially announcing today, will include 7.7-inch, 10-inch and 13-inch models. All three Wi-Fi-only tablets are running Google’s Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system; they are aluminum-encased, have Gorilla Glass displays, come with a five-megapixel rear camera and a two-megapixel front-facing camera, and include new Nvidia TegraTM 3 processors.</p><p>
The Excite 7.7 also has an AMOLED display, a micro-USB port and a micro-SD card slot; while the Excite 10 has an LED-backlit display, micro-USB and micro-HDMI ports, and a full-sized SD card slot. At 1.32 pounds, the new 10-inch weighs just slightly less than Toshiba’s last tablet.

So here’s how things work: Apple does, in fact, display the iPad (and iPhone and iPod Touch) as 100% charged just before a device reaches a completely charged state. At that point, it will continue charging to 100%, then discharge a bit and charge back up to 100%, repeating that process until the device is unplugged.

Doing so allows devices to maintain an optimum charge, Apple VP Michael Tchao told AllThingsD today.

Two weeks ago, a Samsung executive with inside knowledge of Apple’s affairs repeated the all-but-forgotten 7.85-inch iPad mini rumor, and same-day (re)reports of contracted display manufacturers added considerable volume to the mini mania.

Still, rumors are just rumors, and they aren’t particularly convincing in and of themselves. It doesn’t matter how many sources echo some generic sentiment. What does matter is a rumor’s singular specificity. In this case, it’s that pesky 7.85 inches.

And what makes everything even more convincing is that the leaky sources never sought to explain why that number’s so darned significant!

So, allow me.

You need not fear heat blisters when handling the new iPad. Apple's new tablet is neither a burn risk, nor even particularly hot in the grand scheme of competing devices.

We know because we tested the iPad against five other tablets.

Sure, the new iPad, like all electronics hardware, heats up when pushed to its limits. This is just a matter of physics. Processors, batteries and back-lit displays generate heat under load.

Consumer Reports proved this when it <a href="http://news.consumerreports.org/electronics/2012/03/our-test-finds-new-ipad-hits-116-degrees-while-running-games.html">recorded a temperature of 116 degrees</a> Fahrenheit on the back of the new iPad – this after plugging the tablet into a wall socket and playing a demanding 3-D game, <em>Infinity Blade 2</em>, for 45 minutes. This little stunt spurred a lot of online chatter, but it didn't explain whether the new iPad's heat generation is above and beyond that of other tablets on the market.

So Wired decided to investigate.

I'm incredibly conflicted, because as much as I love the do-anything computer …

I'm not sure that many people in the world truly need a general purpose computer that can do anything and install any kind of software. Simply meeting the core needs of browsing the web and email and maybe a few other basic things covers a lot of people.

I believe the kitchen-sink-itis baked into the general purpose computing foundations of PCs, Macs, and Unix make them fundamentally incompatible with our brave new Post PC world. Updates. Toolbars. Service Packs. Settings. Anti-virus. Filesystems. Control panels. All the stuff you hate when your Mom calls you for tech support? It's deeply embedded into of the culture and design of every single general purpose computer. Doing potentially "anything" comes at a steep cost in complexity.

Very, very small PCs – the kind you could fit in your pocket – are starting to have the same amount of computing grunt as a high end desktop PC of, say, 5 years ago. And that was plenty, even back then, for a relatively inefficient general purpose operating system.

We <a href="http://9to5mac.com/2012/03/21/new-ipad-users-blowing-by-their-monthly-plan-in-hours-thanks-to-lte/">mentioned</a> earlier that some new iPad owners were reporting issues with Wi-Fi. The problem seems to affect all models of the new device with both users of the 4G LTE model and the Wi-Fi-only model experiencing poor Wi-Fi reception. Many forum posters compared Wi-Fi reception with their other iOS devices and MacBooks on the same network:

What’s an hour of a great experience worth in megabytes? Who decided that there is an optimum size for a digital magazine? And what is it? 50MB? 200mb? Sitting and waiting for a magazine to download at any size is a hassle, but with Newsstand auto-downloads and progressive downloading (coming soon to Mag+), I think this has largely been mitigated.

My point is that I don’t believe people actually give a flying frog about file size—they care about value. And most content creation companies have not yet even begun to tap what can be done in this space. For instance, why not instead of just delivering Walking Dead as a video file, make it an “issue.” In it, you could have interviews with the actors, slideshows of behind the scenes photos, an interactive game, a live feed of news from the show AND the actual episode itself, playable in full-screen and over AirPlay.

So, when plugged in, the back of the new iPad became as much as 12 degrees [Fahrenheit] hotter than the iPad 2 did in the same tests; while unplugged the difference was 13 degrees [Fahrenheit].

During our tests, I held the new iPad in my hands. When it was at its hottest, it felt very warm but not especially uncomfortable if held for a brief period.

The survey, conducted last month, is yet another confirmation that no company comes close to matching the iPad in the enterprise. Indeed, the iPad wannabes are barely on the radar. While 84% of the companies that plan to buy a tablet in the next quarter said they will go with Apple's iPad, up from 77% in November, just 8% said they will buy one from the No. 2 brand, Samsung, compared to 10% in the previous survey.

But Samsung, a highly diversified company, can better withstand a poor showing in the tablet market than can Hewlett-Packard and Dell. "Those companies need to win a toehold in tablets as PCs become less important, <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/d/consumerization-of-it/4-ways-consumerization-threatens-dell-and-hp-187240">and they're not doing it</a>," [Changewave research director Paul] Carton says. "We're very bearish on them."

Did you hear? This past weekend set all kinds of iPad sales records. Tim Cook said it! AT&T said it! And while I'm sure the new iPad was a huge part of that, let's temper our applause. There are two generations of iPad on shelves, and AT&T has confirmed that its "record numbers" from Friday include both of them.

The new iPad shares nearly nothing with the iPad 2 hardware, according to Apple executives I spoke with. Its retina display has 1 million more pixels than a large-screen HDTV. The new A5X chip has, according to Apple, four times the processing power of Nvidia’s Tegra 3 chip. Compared with iPad 2, it has a nicer camera, a video camera, dictation input, and 4G, while still squeezing out 10 hours of (Wi-Fi) battery life. It’s a wee bit thicker and an ounce heavier. And yet, in my conversations with numerous reporters over the past few days, the theme they kept bringing up was “incremental innovation”: Will the next iPad be innovative enough to maintain Apple’s momentum?

If the iPhone 4S is a case study, the answer for consumers is a resounding “yes.”

According to Yandex.Metrica, by the end of January 2012, at least one million of all online visitors to websites in the Russian internet4 were iPad users. More than 700,000 of them were from Russia.

The iPad was officially released in Russia in November 2010. By that time, several tens of thousands of iPads were already in use in the country. In early 2011, their number exceeded 100,000 and then it increased six times during the year. Over the same period, the number of both mobile phone users and PC users also went up, but the progress was significantly slower than the growth in the number of iPad users – the number of mobile phone users increased 2.5 times, while the number of PC users grew only 1.4 times.

A recent ChangeWave Research survey of 1,604 business IT buyers shows the new iPad is already having a powerful impact on the corporate tablet market.   

Going forward, better than one-in-five companies (22%) say they’ll be purchasing tablets for their employees during 2nd Quarter 2012, and the percentage reporting they’ll buy Apple iPads has jumped to the highest level of corporate iPad demand ever seen in a ChangeWave survey.

A total of 84% of companies planning to buy tablets next quarter now say they’ll purchase iPads – a 7-pt leap since the previous survey.

Google's approach, which is to say that apps should be screen-size-independent and that it's okay to blow up phone apps to tablet size, is simply wrong. Developers need to take different design approaches on a 4-inch screen and on a 10-inch one. There is no shortcut, no way around this.

The result is that you have a lot of apps on Android tablets—Twitter and Facebook are the most prominent—that function but look ugly and take lousy advantage of the real estate. They aren't grainy like iPhone apps blown up to 2x on an iPad, but they're awkward to use and full of blank space.

We see this problem regularly in the PCMag Labs when we try to do Android tablet app stories. It's easy to create a list of 75 great iPad apps. Building a list of great Android tablet apps is harder. On our last attempt, our software team only found 12.

So, just how big is the battery?  The new iPad clocks in at 42.5 watt-hours, which works out to 11,666 mAh. That is a solid 70% boost to capacity over the iPad 2′s 25 watt-hour,  6,944 mAh battery.  The new iPad maintains the established 10-hour lifespan standard, and even if you’re active over LTE rather than Wi-Fi, you’re still getting a very respectable 9 hours of life. 

To put that in context, an iPad 2 with with this new battery, if such a device existed, would probably last close to 17 hours on Wi-Fi.

How does this shape up versus other LTE tablets? Well, Samsung claims the LTE-enabled Galaxy Tab 10.1 has 12 hours of continuous usage with a 7000 mAh battery, while AT&T claims just as much with HTC Jetstream and its 7,300 mAh battery. Of course, these are dealing 1280 x 800 screens, which are bound to be way less taxing on lifetime, but it’s still a considerable difference.

There’s a silly notion going around that Apple will release “iPhoto for iPad.” That’s stupid, and if you believe it, I feel awfully sorry for you. Here’s why.

First, Apple isn’t hiring people to develop iPhoto for iPad, but they are hiring people to develop Aperture for iPad.

This is the framework on which every Apple product development is hung:

Every product at Apple starts with design. Designers are treated like royalty at Apple, where the entire product conforms to their vision. This the polar opposite of the way it works at other companies. Instead of the design being beholden to the manufacturing, finance or manufacturing departments, these all conform to the will of the design department headed by Jony Ive.

Let's return to the big question - good, bad or indifferent sales?

Piper Jaffray had been predicting 5.6m will be sold this year (calendar year 2010), but on getting those official Apple numbers revised it downwards, to 4.3m. Forrester is rather less positive: it thinks 3m. iSuppli has the frankly hard-to-believe 7m in 2010, tripling by 2012.

ChangeWave asked 254 new Kindle Fire owners a series of questions regarding their overall satisfaction and key likes and dislikes, to gauge their reaction to the new tablet device.

Customer Satisfaction. When asked how satisfied they are with their new tablet device, better than one-in-two Kindle Fire owners (54%) say they are Very Satisfied. Another 38% say they are Somewhat Satisfied.

In previous ChangeWave surveys we've found that the percentage of tablet owners who say they are Very Satisfied with a particular device is highly predictive of future demand for that device. So how does the Amazon tablet rating match up against other tablet devices?

While the 54% Very Satisfied rating for the Kindle Fire is considerably below the 74% rating of the industry leading Apple iPad*, it is higher than the 49% average rating for all of the other tablet devices combined.

Have you noticed an increased presence of Apple products in public spaces and workspaces in the last few years? Turns out that 21% of information workers are using one or more Apple products for work. Almost half of enterprises (1000 employees or more) are issuing Macs to at least some employees – and they plan a 52% increase in the number of Macs they issue in 2012.

The capital of Wisconsin is buying 600 iPads this spring and plans to buy another 800 this fall, all paid for using funds from the state's settlement with Microsoft related to consumer lawsuits claiming the company overcharged customers for its software.

Most people (and reviewers) seem to believe that the 10.1in screens (measured diagonally) on the Android Tablets are larger than the 9.7in iPad screen – but they are actually 5% smaller than the iPad in terms of the image area of the screen, which is what really counts. This is due to both Aspect Ratio geometry (the screen area decreases as the Aspect Ratio increases) and the Android system bar, which reduces the image area.

"I’m guessing Apple’s pitch to the textbook companies is something like this: 'Digital transformation of your industry is inevitable. Here’s our plan; we’d like you to come along for the ride. But if you choose not to, we won’t hesitate to leave you behind.'"

"While the iPad’s lead in the tablet market is obvious, it’s becoming more clear there’s strong competition for market share below it. The Amazon Kindle Fire represented an average of 2.4 ad impressions on Chitikas network for every 100 iPad impressions, but RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook wasn’t far behind; it viewed an average of 1.8 ad impressions for every 100 iPad impressions on Chitika’s mobile ad network."

"Something must have gone horribly horribly wrong over at Deutsche Bank because I just don’t see THAT much of an effect. I don’t know what Chris Whitmore did but there’s just something wrong with his math. Global PC sales were 92 Million in Q3/2011 including 5 million Macs sold by Apple. They also sold 11 Million iPads which brings the total number up to 103 million “PCs”. If you look at the Deutsche Bank numbers HP has a market share of 17% (Gartner gives it as 17.7%). To make them drop off to under 15% as the Deutsche Bank graphs shows Apple would have had to sell over 18 million iPads which they simply didn’t."