The iPad Air Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 29, 2013 9:00 PM ESTDisplay
In building the iPad Air Apple shrunk all elements of the tablet’s design, including the thickness of the display. We’re still dealing with a 9.7-inch 4:3 2048 x 1536 IPS LCD panel with true RGB stripe rather than some weird subpixel structure. Viewing angles are still great, and overall the display remains the best you can get at this size.
The iPad Air continues Apple’s recent history of shipping color calibrated displays. Color accuracy on my iPad Air review sample is better than on any previous iPad I’ve ever tested, in fact it’s more accurate than any other tablet I’ve ever tested. The numbers are easily backed up by images that show a vibrant and, more importantly, accurate display.
The iPad Air gets pretty bright at 426 nits, although black levels aren’t all that impressive at 0.44 nits. Overall contrast ratio is in line with what we’ve seen from previous iPads. My only complaint on the display front is I would like to see Apple laminate the cover glass to the LCD display. Reducing reflections would go a long way towards improving the usability of the device, not to mention the impact that would have on improving display quality in dark movie scenes.
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Krysto - Friday, November 1, 2013 - link
Why would the aspect ratio matter in calculating the surface area?thunng8 - Friday, November 1, 2013 - link
Of course aspect ratio affects areaTake an extreme example a tablet of length 25cm and width of 1cm. Surface area is 25cm^2. Diagonal is still 25cm. ( to be more precise 25.02cm).
gnx - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link
As I mentioned, I find both a 7.9 inch ipad mini and galaxy note 8.0 (which is really closer to iPad Mini) both too cramped and small, as I use the table for foremost as a document reader on the go. And just to add, the Galaxy Tab 8.9 was 1280:800, thus 16:10, making even overall space closer to an iPad.Finally, for practically reasons, the Galaxy Tab 8.9 was nice, since because it's height in portrait mode was almost identical to an iPad 2/3/4, just narrower in breath, I could chose from most iPad accessories such as any carrying cases, pouches, bluetooth keyboard, etc.
yoshi1080 - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link
I still love my iPad 3, but I'm thinking about upgrading. I do a lot of stuff on it and sometimes I wish it'd be faster. The iPad Air should be around 3–4x faster, right?Two of the most demanding tasks where I wish my iPad was faster are photo and video editing. I've already read that iMovie is supposed to be really fast on the iPad Air, so that's a clear advantage. My iPad's speed is sufficient for JPEG editing, but RAW processing (with PiRAWnha) is practically unusable. Processing RAW photos on my iPad would be my dream because photo editing on it is just so much more fun than on my iMac with the dreadfully slow Aperture – I'd be happy with getting 90% of the quality, but RAW is mandatory for me.
Up until now I thought the iPad Air would be much better suited for PiRAWnha. But now Anand writes about the RAM bottleneck due to the 64bit architecture and this makes me wonder: On the original iPad, the app often complained about too little available RAM and eventually crashed. I feel like the 1GB RAM on the iPad 3 is the reasonable minimum – would the Air be a disappointment in that regard? On the other hand, Adobe is working on bringing Lightroom and those smart DNGs to the iPad, and the beta version has even been shown running on an old iPad 2.
darkcrayon - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link
Apps just don't need as much RAM as we think they do, especially mobile versions. Sometimes I'm surprised what can still run just fine on an iPad 2 (also helps of course that only one foreground app needs to run at a time). The Air should be 4 times faster than the iPad 3- should be no contest, especially in CPU.Death666Angel - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link
Well, using one app at a time is fine, but browsing the web with a few tabs open and then switching to one or two other apps gets Apple device quickly ejecting stuff from RAM, where my Nexus devices are still having the pages loaded. :)fteoath64 - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link
Thanks for the detailed review!. As I suspected the A7 behavior would have been rather different to wring out more performance out for the iPad as compared to the iphone. As you stated in the power consumption measurements, it seems the A7 is rather power hungry and only aggressive power management gets the battery life it needs. I am sure, it would be waiting for the TSMC 20nm process node as it seems this chip is just at the brink of 28nm as it is today. In making, the battery last so long without negatively impacting user performance, Apple has done a great job to achieve the balance using software. From the power draw alone, I figured out why it was clocked at such speeds instead of 1.6Ghz or 1.8Ghz. It cannot afford the power budget associated with it!.iwod - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link
Sk Hynix Just announced a 6Gb LPDDR3. A Maximum of 3GB when 4 of them Stacked, Interesting isn't it?How about 2 Channel use? 1.5GB of Memory? May be a big company / customer would like / require this ?
While I hope Apple will give us 2GB in next generation. The reality may very well be we get 1.5GB of memory only.
bigup - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link
is the 1GB RAM really a deal breaker? sold my ipad 3 to buy the iPad Air but now having seconds thoughts - what do you think?darkcrayon - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link
It's not a deal breaker. You could argue in 2 years it would be better with more, but you're already the type of person that sells their less than 2 year old iPad for the latest, so... ;)