The Apple iPad may not hit the streets until tomorrow morning. But we don’t need to wait for some crazy enthusiast to take one apart to see what it looks like beneath glossy screen. That’s because you can already check out a series of internal photos courtesy of the FCC web site.
You can’t see everything that’s inside the case from the photos. But you can see a rather large 24.8Whr battery, which we already know should be good for 10 hours or more of run time. Since the FCC is most concerned with wireless components, there are also a number of closeups of the WiFi and Bluetooth modules. What you don’t get a good look at is the case with the battery removed — so you can’t see the A4 chip in its natural environment. It’s also tough to see whether there’s room for hackers to add anything crazy like a USB port. For that, I guess we will have to wait until tomorrow.
pair of iPads was just revealed in the FCC's system in perfect synchrony with that little pre-order sitch with which you may or may not already be familiar. Apple, of course, has a track record of timing its FCC filings perfectly so that virtually nothing is revealed before Cupertino wants it to be, and frankly, you're not going to get much here that you didn't already know -- the photographs (both external and internal) and the user manual are all still under confidentiality. Both units were tested for WiFi 802.11a/b/g/n and Bluetooth, while one -- model number A1337 -- adds in GSM 850 / 1900 and UMTS 850 / 1900, so it appears that Apple has bundled all of its 3G and non-3G models into just two filings regardless of storage capacity. We caught A1337 flipping through an old issue of 2600, so for all we know, it socially engineered its way to FCC approval -- whatever it takes to make that late-April launch window, right?
