New iPad gets warm not hot

[Ed Hardy]

You've probably seen reports around the web about the new iPad getting hot while in use. Because things like this sometimes get overblown, I wanted to share my personal experience.

When watching video for extended periods of time, the lower left side of the back panel will get warm. In tests with an infrared thermometer, the hottest temperature I saw was 96°. This was after about an hour of continuous video. The rest of the back ranged between 92° and 94°.

The region that reaches the highest temperature is directly above the iPad's graphical processing unit. This is a quad core GPU, and is clearly generating a certain amount of heat when handling video.

As this temperature is below that of the human body, I would classify this as warm rather than hot. It is certainly well below what many laptops experience, which can get to be over 150° as part of normal operation.

Basically, I am not thrilled about this, but I don't consider it a fatal flaw.
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[Ed Hardy]

Apple says the new iPad opperates "well within our thermal specifications." To me, this means that the device doesn't get nearly as hot as a laptop (see my comments above).
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