The dingus does, however, have that to-die-for high-resolution retina display it was rumored to have.

It also has a souped-up A5X chip, and a new five-megapixel iSight camera.

The new chip includes quad-core graphics said to be 4x better than a Tegra 3 or 2x better the performance of the iPad 2.

The camera’s advanced optics can capture 1080p HD video and includes a new video image stabilization feature that removes the bumps and shakes typically seen when filming with a hand-held device.

The screen, the same 9.4-inch size as the iPad 2, offers 264 PPI, which means the human eye can’t see an isolated pixel. The resolution, as expected, comes in at 2,048 by 1,536, or 3.1 million pixels, a million more than HDTV.

Web pages, text, images and video look incredibly sharp and realistic, with 44% more color saturation.

iPhoto works on the new iPad and it sounds like there’s nothing that can be done to a photograph that can’t be done on an iPad, suggesting that Apple is staking out the content creation market.

Apple has added a new feature called photo beaming to transfer pictures between devices and backside illumination for taking picture in low-level light. The iWorks suite and iMovie have also been updated to show off the widget’s features.

As suspected the device is a tiny bit fatter (9.4mm compared to 8.8mm) and a tad heavier (1.4lbs versus 1.33lbs). Given the widget’s functionality nobody’s going to notice.

The thing will take dictation turning speech into text in English, French, German and Japanese. (There’s a special mic button on the keyboard.) It does not have the highly popular iPhone 4S Siri voice-control.

Pricing is the same as for the iPad 2, which Apple is keeping, cutting its entry-level price to $399 for 16GB and Wi-Fi starting now. The iPad 2 with Wi-Fi and 3G is now $529.

The new iPad supports 4G LTE, which will make it pricier than the old iPad: $629 for 16GB, $729 for 32GB and $829 for 64GB. With just Wi-Fi, which is the best most of the world can muster, it’ll cost $499 for 16GB, $599 for 32GB and $699 for 64GB.

Apple claims the new Wi-Fi-only iPad will deliver 10 hours battery life, the 4G models nine hours.

The new iPad is supposed to deliver 10 times faster download and upload speeds so web pages load quickly and e-mails with large attachments can be sent and received with relative ease. Personal Hotspot (which needs a supporting data plan) can be used to share the iPad’s fast network connection with up to five other devices using Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or USB.

It comes in black or white and deliveries start next Friday March 16 in the US, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Puerto Rico, Singapore, Switzerland, the UK and the US Virgin Islands. Apple is taking orders now.

Deliveries elsewhere are set to start on March 23 beginning with Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Macau, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden.

The device is supposed to run most of the 585,000 apps in the Apple App Store including the 200,000-odd native iPad apps. There’s also iTunes and iBooks.

Apple said iPad, iPhone and iPod delivered 76% of its revenue last year. It sold 172 million of these so-called post-PC devices and 315 million iOS devices.

Apple has also updated its TV box, which streams videos to TV sets, to support higher-definition video. It cost $99.

Unless something has really changed Sculley’s got money in an eight-year-old Florida outfit called OpenPeak – enough to have rated a board seat – and OpenPeak just raised a tidy $52 million – from Intel among others – on top of a $30 million C round it got in late 2007 from Morton Topfer, the former vice-chairman of Dell now a managing director of Castletop Capital, and RRE Ventures among others. And OpenPeak’s got a PDA-style tablet or maybe it’s a tablet-style PDA – Sculley is credited with inventing the term PDA – that may or may not give the iPad a run for its money.

The gadget may also be the phone call-capable tablet that BT means to bring to market soon, a gadget that’s already sold – at least in a previous life form – by Verizon as the Hub and O2 as Joggler – and soon, it’s said, by AT&T (Engadget says to think iPad pricing).

OpenPeak has apparently always had ambitions to replace the home phone with what Sculley called the “third screen.”

The skinny new multimedia OpenTablet 7 – based on the power-saving 1.9GHz Moorestown Atom – which explains Intel’s new interest – has a little something for everybody: Internet connectivity, e-mail, Linux, Flash, a 7-inch TFT LCD touchscreen with LED backlighting, front and rear cameras for video, stills and video conferencing, HDMI plug, microSD slot, integrated 802.11b/g/n Wi-FI, Bluetooth 2.1, cellular and USB 2.0 connectivity, built-in speakers, a microphone and a docking station for recharging and port replication. The thing measure 9 by 5 by 0.6 inches.

Applications – and reportedly it’s already got “thousands” of them and they’re supposedly platform-independent – can be written using Adobe’s Creative Studio and OpenPeak speaks of a “fully partitioned” revenue-sharing white label app store.

In the all-things-to-all-people fashion of the times the dingus can also function as a reportedly promising home energy manager and it’s got a deal for the thing with smart meter maker Intron.

Not all the latest round is equity funding; some of it is debt funding from Horizon Technology Finance and Velocity Financial Group and distribution finance and working capital from GE Capital.

The money is earmarked for product development and new markets. The company is also into multimedia phones, set-top boxes.

OpenPeak was started by CEO Daniel Gittleman, who sold his last company StorageApps (nee RAID Power Services) and its SANLink storage virtualization software to HP in 2001 for $350 million.

Oh, by the way, Jobs hasn’t spoken to Sculley in 20-odd years.