• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, March 1, 2012

Perhaps it is Steve Jobs’ infamous “reality distortion field” at work on a corporate level, but there seems to be little discussion around iPad fragmentation as the specs for next week’s iPad 3 introduction leak out.

With each new iteration of the iPad, Apple adds some enticing capabilities that are available only to its most recent buyers. I know, I know. Such is the story of technical innovation. Early days. Yadda, yadda. We do want the hardware to move forward. But I can’t help but wonder how much more content and marketing innovation we will see on this platform once it gets to mass scale around a reliable feature set.

I still work with my original issue iPad for most things, and it's clear to me that much of the programming now is aimed at the processing power of the iPad 2. A lot of apps feel sluggish on the iPad 1 now, especially games. And I am not altogether sure that iOS 5 itself was well tuned to the first generation of the tablet. Heretical as it may seem to the fan boys who think anything Apple makes must be “rock solid,” I get a lot of app crashes on the iPad (iPhone, too) under iOS 5. And the crashes often come from Apple’s own programs, like Safari and the App Store.

I skipped the IPad 2 generation because of cost, and largely because I have a version 2 loaner to work with anyway. But the performance difference between the two generations is wide, and the addition of a camera and AirPlay mirroring for the iPad 2 have proven to be significant. Augmented reality on the iPad has tremendous promise, but my iPad 1 is left out. And yet the considerable processing power of the iPad 2 still does not seem enough to keep up with some of the AR gaming pyrotechnics that have been attempted. The iPad 3 will kick up the power yet again, so I have to wonder what apps will play nicely on which hardware.

The arrival of the rumored higher-res screen will have app makers scrambling to accommodate the doubled pixel count. More to the point is whether some developers will begin targeting the higher-res display and then somehow have to downgrade the graphics for the 55 million iPads in market that preceded it.

There is also the rumor out this week that Apple might introduce a lower-cost iPad 2 with 8 GB of storage at a sub-$400 price point. From a merchandising perspective this makes sense, as it directly challenges the Fire and Nook Tablet. But it also formalizes a two-tier hardware selection that developers must target. And 8 GB of storage on one of these things is a challenge when images, game apps and magazine issues all come in with some hefty file sizes.

No doubt the iOS platform for tablets gives app makers a much more consistent target than does the weird world of Android tablets. With most of that market now downsized to 7-inch displays and forked by Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Google into different iterations, a clear format and distribution path is daunting at best. But as a media platform, tablets themselves remain in an infant state of rapid growth. The clothes you buy for it this year may well not fit next year.

Tablet apps that interact more fluidly with their environment through AR, hi-res cams, perhaps Siri support, and LTE ultimately will supercharge this market, I believe. Once publishers and marketers can count on having certain multi-functionality on a large enough base of tablets, I think we are going to see some amazing tablet use cases emerge.