After much hype and fevered speculation, the tech world finally got a look at the latest generation of Apple's iPad tablet Wednesday.

By the numbers

  • Apple sold 15.43 million iPads in the first quarter of its fiscal year 2012 , which spanned 14 weeks and ended Dec. 31, 2011, a 111 per cent unit increase over the same quarter a year previous.
  • More than 25 billion iPad and iPhone apps have been downloaded from Apple's App Store since it came online.
  • The 25 billionth app downloaded was the game Where's my Water?
  • The App Store has more than 550,000 apps.
  • More than 170,000 of the apps are iPad specific
  • The iPhone app of the year for 2011 was Instagram.

Apple CEO Tim Cook unveiled the device at a launch event in San Francisco.

Here are some of the most significant details about the new gadget.

  1. Its official name is the New iPad, proof that minimalism remains the guiding principle at Apple.
  2. Oh, and it only comes in black and white.
  3. The latest iteration contains Apple's retina display technology, which boasts a sharper screen. How sharp? Poke-you-in-the-eye sharp. The resolution is 2048 by 1536, or 3.1 million pixels. Sharp. It's capable of playing movies at 1080-pixel HD resolution.
  4. Improved processing speed. It contains the A5X processor, an upgrade from the A5 chip used in the iPad 2. Apple claims the A5X is four times faster than its closest competitor (Nvidia's Tegra 3).
  5. A more respectable backside camera — five megapixels, up from the underwhelming 0.7 megapixel jobbie on the iPad 2.
  6. Apple's latest tablet can access the high-speed 4G LTE network, and apparently Bell, Rogers and Telus are all teed up to offer the LTE service for the iPad in Canada.
  7. At 640 grams, the New iPad is slightly heavier than its predecessors. Whatever happened to less is more?.
  8. The ship date is March 16. Apple says the new gadget will be simultaneously available in the U.S., Canada, U.K., France, Germany, Switzerland and Japan.
  9. The Canadian price for the base model is $519.

Web buzz

Take a look at what the online world was saying about the new iPad in CBC's Storify on the topic below: