CIOIN

The January Wolf Moon this past week has set the iOSsphere howling with iPad 3 rumors.

Yes, the Next iPad might have been seen at or near the Consumer Electronics Show, but you need a micrometer to tell the difference; the Chinese proletariat are busy as beavers assembling it; Siri for iPad is seen but alas not heard; and iPad 3 will help stem the tide of orangutan depression. (Catch up with our iPad 3 rumor rollup for the week ending Jan. 3 too.)

You read it here second.

"To be honest, it's very difficult to tell at this stage of the game. It could be any of the above, none, or all three - we just don't know."

~ Richard Goodwin, KnowYourMobile, on what a recent iPad rumor means, after he firmly declared it fact.

Is this an iPad 3 which I see before me at CES?

You'll never know, according to Jeremy Horwitz, editor-in-chief, iLounge.com, who began a Tuesday blogpost with the sensational claim, "Yesterday, one day ahead of the 2012 CES, I saw what's supposedly the next-generation iPad."

"I'd show you a picture, but there's honestly nothing to be seen," he continues. "Think iPhone 4 to iPhone 4S: this device so resembles the iPad 2 that differences are only obvious when they're placed next to each other. From the back, you could walk past this new iPad on display and have no idea that anything had changed."

Can it be true? Will Apple actually announce an "iPad 2S?"

His glimpse of whatever-it-was, which he somehow estimated to be about 6 months old, revealed to him that the next iPad's body is "roughly 1 mm" thicker than the current iPad, which would look like this. For the metrically challenged, that would be 0.03937 inches, or the thickness of JVCC FELT-06 Polyester Felt Tape. 

Not much in terms of "major" or "radical" redesign here: "On the rear, the camera in the upper left corner has become bigger — noticeably so when placed alongside the iPad 2, but not so huge that anyone would think they were different at a distance," according to Horwitz. "The new camera hole is silver-ringed, and does in fact look the same size as the iPhone 4S's much-improved rear camera system, minus the LED flash."

A silver-ringed camera hole? Could this be the advent of the iYawn 3?

Basically, if you've seen the iPad 2, you know what iPad 3 will look like "apart, of course, from the screen," Horwitz adds. "That's going to be Apple's big focus when the new device is announced, but I didn't see it."

Horwitz wants to dial down the sensationalism. "While it would be exciting to lead with a sensational 'I touched the iPad 3!' headline, I feel obliged to mention a couple of things to put the information above in proper perspective," he says. To us, the "I saw what's supposedly the next-generation iPad" seems a bit sensational, but perhaps that's a quibble.

So he mentions, first, that "these changes are so modest that Apple could easily call this device the "iPad 2S" or "iPad 2HD" if it wanted to start the lettering game with its tablets." The dreaded "S." And secondly, he mentions that "the screen and other major internal changes could collectively justify the "iPad 3" moniker, but we'll see."

But technically, as with the iPhone 4S, we won't see since all the big changes will be internal. And we know how well that went over....