The next generation of iPad apps are likely to be so large in size that fitting more than a handful of downloads on the base-level 16GB tablet will prove impossible.

The Retina Display housed on the new iPad (check out our Apple new iPad review) has meant that some optimised applications are more than five times the size of the original versions.

Vietnamese site Tinhte has examined the download sizes for the refreshed iWork and iLife suites and found that key apps have at least doubled in required storage space.

Keynote has gone from 115MB to 327MB, the Numbers application moves from 109MB to 283MB, while Pages has nearly tripled to 269MB. The biggest offender, however, is the iMovie video editing suite which has gone from 70MB to 404MB.

While some of these increases can be accounted for by feature enhancements, they're mostly down to the graphical improvements needed to fill the giant 2048 x 1526 Retina Display.

If the same logic is applied to apps that are already reliant on plenty of memory space then the end game is 3-4GB applications on a device that only allows around 14GB of additional content. Add one or two 1080p movies into the mix and that's already one full iPad.

Those conclusions suggest that the 16GB new iPad is only really suitable for simple applications, the odd book and web browsing or for those who're happy to rotate the content on the device based on their needs at any particular time. The end result is likely to be more users opting for the top-end 64GB model than ever before.

Via: The Verge