iPad 3 Is The One To “Make A Song & Dance About

We’ve received some tidbits of information about the iPad 2 launch tomorrow from an Apple staffer:

• MobileMe is being revamped with cloud storage features.
• The iPad 2 is a ho-hum update. It’s more of a speed bump than a redesign.
• The iPad 3 is the one to get excited about, and it’s on track for release later this year.

The Apple staffer, who asked to remain anonymous for obvious reasons, said the new MobileMe service will store music, TV shows, and films that were purchased from the iTunes store. The staffer also said that there was talk inside Apple of being able to upload all your music and videos to the cloud whether it was purchased from iTunes or not. However, they couldn’t confirm whether this will be rolled out or not. Before Apple bought it, the LaLa music service allowed users to upload music to an online locker for streaming to any device. There has been a lot of speculation that Apple would roll LaLa’s service into iTunes to create a streaming music service.

The Apple staffer declined to give details about the iPad 2 or 3, but said:

“For the iPad 2 don’t get your hopes up too high. That’s all I’m going to say. They’ve had a number of problems along the way, and the third-generation iPad is the one to make a song and a dance about.”

The iPad 2 is expected to thinner and lighter than the first iPad. It will have both front- and rear-facing cameras for FaceTime videoconferencing and for photos and video.

It will have a larger, beefier speaker but the screen is expected to be the same resolution as the first iPad — no super high-res screen for this update.

It will have a faster chip and more RAM, and it will likely have a Qualcomm dual-mode wireless chip for connecting to both GSM and CDMA data networks.