New iPad Shows Up 3 Days Early in Vietnam — Benchmarks, Unboxing Ensue

New iPad Shows Up 3 Days Early in Vietnam — Benchmarks, Unboxing Ensue:

The new iPad gets an unboxing three days early. Photo: Tinhte.vn

The new iPad is scheduled to arrive in the hands of consumers on Friday, March 16, but that hasn’t stopped one tablet from breaking free of Apple’s scheduled release date.
Someone at a Vietnamese site called Tinhte.vn got his hands on a new iPad a few days earlier than everyone else, thanks to help from retailer MuaBaniPhone. The site has published the usual unboxing photos, but went the extra mile and also posted a video of the new iPad in action. The video — which is entirely in Vietnamese — includes side-by-side comparison shots of the new iPad and the iPad 2.

Apple forbade journalists from taking photos of the new iPad next to the iPad 2 at its event last week, so Tinhte’s video marks the first time we’ve seen the two iPads together. The biggest difference between the two devices, besides the thicker chassis, is the larger optics on the back of the new iPad. Apple updated the camera on the iPad to 5 megapixels. It’s a huge jump from the 0.7-megapixel camera found on the iPad 2.
Tinhte’s Geekbench test of the iPad confirms earlier reports that the new tablet has 1GB of RAM — double the RAM of its predecessor, the iPad 2. The additional RAM is needed to support the quad-core GPU that drives the iPad’s Retina Display. The Geekbench test also confirmed that the iPad’s new A5X chip is running at the same 1GHz speed as the iPad 2′s A5 processor.
This isn’t the first time an Apple device has been released into the wild prior to its official release date. A small number of German customers received the iPhone 4S three days before the official release. American iPhone 4 customers received their devices two days earlier than expected in 2010, while the original iPad showed up on doorsteps a day early for some lucky British customers that same year.
What makes today’s early iPad release so unique is that the tablet wasn’t delivered early, but was leaked by a retailer. MuaBaniPhone, which has new iPad photos on its site as well, doesn’t show up in a quick search of Apple’s official retailers in Vietnam, so how they got the new iPad is anyone’s guess.
Are these Vietnamese iPads fully legit? We think so, based on the comparison footage shown in the video. Let us know what you think in the comments below.