Six Key Things Announced at the Apple iPad Event , Apple held an event in San Francisco on March 7th where they announced the latest generation iPad called, oddly enough the iPad (no number three or “HD” suffix). Here’s a rundown of some of the things we liked at the announcement.

Lots More Pixels Although the previous generation and latest generation iPad look almost identical, once you fire up the device you’ll notice a dramatic improvement in screen resolution. Despite the fact that the new iPad doesn’t have quite the number of pixels per inch as the iPhone 4/4S (326 for the iPhone and 264 for the new iPad, 132 for the iPad 2), the difference is barely perceptible.

More Muscle to Power the Pixels Prior to the announcement the rumor mill was rife with reports of a quad-core processor for the new iPad. As it turns out the CPUs remained dual core while the GPUs (graphic processing unit) went quad core. Apple claims this new chip can deliver 4x the performance of NVIDIAs quad-core Tegra 3 processor. This new processing power should contribute to some nice graphics performance for anything from games to video viewing.

Improved Camera Although the front-facing camera didn’t get a makeover, the back-facing one got a boost to 5MP along with improvements to the sensor and controllers. iPhoto, the powerful photo editor has been ported to the iPad. Picture taking and editing should become more fun with the higher (2048 x 1536) resolution display and increased graphics performance.

Bigger Battery Maintains Current Uptime Apple beefed up the battery in the new iPad but didn’t claim any big gains in battery life. Apparently the higher resolution display, added processing power and the newly added 4G LTE connectivity (on some models) added some load to the battery which the new beefed up battery compensates for.

4G LTE Wireless Connectivity When the iPhone 4S came out last year some people were expecting the follow-on to 3G connectivity, 4G LTE which can deliver Wi-Fi-like speeds using the cell network. 4G LTE is now an option on the iPad increasing the price $130 over the Wi-Fi-only version. Creating a hot spot for other devices using 4G LTE is available (only on Verizon at the moment) but you'd better be prepared to pay for the extra data.

Siri is Not At Your Command But… If you like Siri, the speech command virtual assistant on the iPhone you’re probably going to be disappointed that all you get of Siri on the new iPad is voice dictation.