iPad 3 with Siri and Retina Display landing on Steve Jobs' birthday

Apple, according to reports, is gearing up to release its third-generation iPad 3 device on February 24.

The news comes via 9to5Mac, which claims that Apple usually unveils its products on Tuesdays or Wednesdays and then launches them on Thursdays or Fridays. For instance, the iPad 2 was unveiled on March 2, Wednesday, and hit stores on March 11, Friday.

Well, February 24 is a Friday – and it’s also Steve Jobs’ birthday. Could this be the day that we see the iPad 3 in stores? We admit it’s a bit of a lose theory at the moment. And one that will on actually hold any weight once we’ve heard official word from inside Apple about a launch.

But it’d be a great homage to the late CEO of Apple and one that we could see happening – what better way to celebrate the big man’s life than with the launch of a new product?

In terms of spec, we’d expect the new iPad 3 to feature a new chipset. Now the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S already use a dual-core A5 chipset, which means the iPad 3 could use a quad-core set-up. But all this will depend on whether or not the new A6 chipsets – what we assume they’ll be called – are ready.

Another big change that is being expected aboard the iPad 3 is a Retina display. Expectations are that iPad3 will have double the Retina display 2048x 1536 as compared to the iPad2. A better camera is also expected on the iPad 3 as well. It’ll most likely be an 8-megapixel set-up similar to the iPhone 4S.

Siri is also expected to feature on the iPad 3, as well as some new gesture-based controls and an end-to-end display.

Of course no one really knows what the iPad 3 will entail until it’s officially launched by Apple. But judging by the spec and power inside some new Android-powered tablets, like the Asus Transformer Prime, we’d expect some pretty big changes.