Judge Throws Out Overheating iPad Lawsuit

US District Court Judge Jeremy Fogel has thrown out a class-action lawsuit filed against Apple in July 2010, according to a report from Computer World.

The suit claimed that the Apple iPad overheats in warm weather and in direct sunlight, and its three plaintiffs, Jacob Balthazar, Claudia Keller and John Browning, reportedly claimed that this made the iPad not at all like a book.

In advertising that “reading on iPad is just like reading a book,” as Apple does, said the trio, the tablet maker had practised fraud, deceptive advertising and violated California laws on consumer protection and unfair business practices.

Inadequate Allegations

On 10 February, Fogel said that the charges were inadequate.

“The Court concludes that these allegations are insufficient,” Fogel wrote in his order, according to the report. “At the least, Plaintiffs must identify the particular commercial or advertisement upon which they relied and must describe with the requisite specificity the content of that particular commercial or advertisement.”

The plaintiffs were given 30 days to file an amended complaint and “add the specifics he cited,” said the report. Which may be as easy as pointing to Apple’s website, where it states, “Reading on iPad is just like reading a book. You hold your iPad like a book. You flip the pages like a book. And you do it all with your hands – just like a book.”

Soon after Apple’s 3 April, 2010, launch of the iPad, some users began complaining of their devices overheating – though after tearing down the device, RapidRepair CEO Aaron Vronko told eWEEK that it appeared that Apple had made “engineering efforts to solve longstanding battery complaints regarding the batteries overheating,” explaining that there had been a “bit of an evolution” from the iPhone to the iPhone 3GS to the iPad battery.

Vronko, poking around inside the iPad, had also found its build quality to be “outstanding,” though he’d noted that none of the hardware in the tablet pushed “the leading edge of design.” Instead, it seemed that Apple had been good about designing a solid tablet, but left itself plenty of room to come out with lots of fireworks – such as a front-facing camera – on its second version of the device.

Next Generation iPad

Despite this, Apple sold nearly 15 million iPads in 2010, and 7.33 million iPads during the first quarter of its fiscal year 2011- in addition to bringing to life an entirely new market that the industry’s largest players, including Samsung, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Motorola, Research In Motion and others, have followed it into.

Apple is reportedly well into work on its next-generation iPad. According to a 9 February report from the Wall Street Journal, it will be “thinner and lighter than the first model” and feature a front-facing camera, more memory and a more powerful graphics processor.

In a 1 February post, the blog 9to5Mac added the new iPad is features a higher build quality and a display that’s “lighter and over [1 mm] thinner than the current iPad’s display with a smaller surrounding frame.”

Rumours about the iPad have even extended to a third-generation of the tablet, with Daring Fireball’s John Gruber speculating that Apple could perhaps debut the iPad 2 in March and begin shipping an iPad 3 in September. IDC research manager Tom Mainelli additionally told PC World that according to the firm’s sources, Apple has already requested that manufacturers begin working on a display with a resolution of 2048 by 1536 for the iPad 3.

Apple, as is its policy, has not commented on any of this, including the news of the lawsuit or its dismissal.