Ben and I recorded a special bonus episode on the heels of Apple’s special announcement. We talk about the new iPad, the new Apple TV, and answer some questions that came in via Twitter.

Nice chart, Samsung.

Jim Dalrymple:

It’s impossible to put into words just how good the Retina display is on the iPad. It’s not just images that look sharper, it’s text too. Reading a Web site or an iBook on the iPad’s display is incredible. Even the home screen on the iPad is crisper and sharper than I expected.

Now on the iTunes App Store.

Jason Kottke:

I will be blogging the liveblogs blogging the announcement. Blog, bloggy, blog, blogggggggggggggg. Bla. Guh.

The thing starts at 1pm ET, so come back then for the only mostly dead Apple liveblog set in Hoefler & Frere-Jones’ lovely Whitney ScreenSmart typeface.

Matthew Panzarino:

Haptics is a tactile feedback technology which uses forces — normally vibrations in mobile devices — to provide feedback through your sense of touch. Most Android phones have some sort of haptic feedback at play and you can feel them at work when you touch the keyboard and get that bzt of a vibration in return. Apple has even filed patents for advanced forms of vibrating haptics. The only problem is that vibrating haptic systems, for the most part, kind of suck.

Something that I simultaneously do and don’t like about Android phones is the vibrate-on-touch haptic feedback — the way the phone will vibrate when you tap on a button. In does help with typing, but at the same time it can be a bit overwhelming to have the entire phone buzz in your hand every time you tap a letter.

This rumor that Matthew Panzarino brings up about an electrostatic-based haptic feedback technology has been circulating for at least a week or more, and I’ve been thinking about it a bit. I am having a hard time imagining just how great or not-great it would be in real life, but, what struck me today is that if anything, I bet this new type of feedback could greatly improve the ability to type on the iPad.

Here’s a CNET video with Dave Rice demoing the technology, and Panzarino’s article has an embedded video as well demoing the tech.

With this electrostatic-based haptic feedback, the whole device doesn’t buzz when you touch a feedback area, only the tip of your finger senses the “friction” that’s transmitted through the screen:

It has a system that uses varying electrostatic fields that can be pushed right through a pane of glass to give a user the feeling of various levels of friction, simulating surfaces. You can see the technology demonstrated back in 2010 on an iPhone here.

I have no personal experience trying this type of technology and so it’s hard to imagine what it’s like. If this does get announced in an hour from now it would make a lot of sense as to why the “And touch.” was part of the invite.

You can only understand the pizazz of a Retina display by looking at one in real life. And it’s likely that you can only truly understand the pizazz of this new touch-feedback technology by touching it in real life.

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Mark Willis pitches some interesting solutions to common problems. The hiccup in signal continuity for when the iPhone decides to transition from a dwindling wi-fi signal to 3G drives me nuts as well. I don’t think Apple would ever go with Mark’s idea of having a setting pane that allowed the user to tell the iPhone that if wi-fi signal is less than, say, 75% strong to drop it and switch to 3G instead. But I do like the concept.