The iPad Air Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 29, 2013 9:00 PM ESTBattery Life
With the iPad Air Apple moved to a 32.4Wh battery, a significant decrease from the 42.5Wh unit in the 3rd and 4th generation iPads. The smaller battery doesn’t come with a change to Apple’s claim of 10 hours of battery life, which implies a reduction in overall platform power. I confirmed a substantial reduction in platform power in my crude measurements earlier in the article. Although it’s possible for the iPad Air to draw substantially more power than the iPad 4, our earlier power data seems to imply that it’s unlikely given the same exact workload. Our battery life tests agree.
We'll start with our 2013 smartphone/tablet web browsing battery life test. As always all displays are calibrated to 200 nits. The workload itself is hidden from OEMs to avoid any intentional gaming, but I've described it at a high level here.
Our web browsing workload came in at exactly 10 hours of continuous usage - an improvement compared to the iPad 4. Battery life on LTE was good as well, consistently delivering just under 10 hours of usage. The fact that both LTE and WiFi tests deliver similar results tells me that we may be bottlenecked by some other component in the system (perhaps display?).
I've been running the same video playback test for a while now, although we're quickly approaching a point where I'll need to move to a higher bitrate 1080p test. Here I'm playing a 4Mbps H.264 High Profile 720p rip I made of the Harry Potter 8 Blu-ray. The full movie plays through and is looped until the battery dies. Once again, the displays are calibrated to 200 nits:
Video playback battery life also improves slightly compared to the iPad 4. Apple’s battery life claims aren’t usually based around video playback, so exceeding their 10 hour suggestion here shouldn’t come as a shock. Apple’s video decode power has always been extremely low.
Our final cross-platform battery life test is based on Kishonti's Egypt HD test. Here we have a loop of the Egypt HD benchmark, capped to 30 fps, running on all of the devices with their screens calibrated to 200 nits.
Our 3D battery life rundown test shows a substantial improvement in battery life over the iPad 4. IMG’s PowerVR G6430, running a moderate workload, can do so more efficiently than any of the previous generation GPUs in Apple’s SoCs. Much like the A7’s CPU cores however, there’s a wider dynamic range of power consumption with the G6430. Running at max performance I would expect to see greater GPU power consumption. The question then becomes what’s more likely? Since the majority of iOS games don’t target the A7 (and instead shoot for lower end hardware), I would expect you to see better battery life even while gaming on the iPad Air vs the iPad 3/4.
Charge Time
The iPad Air comes with the same 12W USB charger and Lightning cable that we first saw with the iPad 4. Having to only charge a 32.5W battery means that charge times are lower compared to the iPad 3 and 4:
A full charge takes a little over 4 hours to complete. The adapter delivers as much as 12W to the iPad, drawing a maximum of 13.5W at the wall. I still think the sweet spot is somewhere closer to 2.5 hours but that’s another balancing game that must be played between charge time and maintaining battery health. It’s still so much better than the ~6 hours of charge time for the iPad 3 and 5.69 hours for the iPad 4.
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Solon - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
The Kindle HDX has a 1920x1200 screen, and the iPad Mini 2 has a 2048x1536 screen. So what does "pack more pixels" mean? Because it doesn't appear to mean more, you know, more pixels. And as far as the packing, the HDX is 323 ppi and the Mini 2 is 326 ppi, which is basically the same. But I guess the Mini 2 has a higher ppi, so it wins here too.Kamus - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
"Pack more pixels" means just that. The Kindle Fire HDX has a 2560x1600 resolution. And it has a 339 PPI, and like the iPad, it is factory calibrated. It is, with out a doubt, a true contender for the best LCD display on a tablet.cheinonen - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
The 8.9" Kindle Fire HDX has a 2560x1600 screen, not the 7". Since the 8.9" hasn't been released yet, all you know are specs on it and we have zero idea if it's calibrated or not. Once it comes out then people can take a look at it. The only numbers I've seen on the Fire HDX are that it encompasses the sRGB gamut which has absolutely nothing to do with accuracy.Morawka - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link
yeah he shut up pretty quick after thatBob Todd - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Comparing any Kindle (or any eReader focused device) to a 'real' tablet is a complete waste of time. The software is so incredibly gimped that using them as a general use tablet is frustrating at best. And don't even start on rooting and custom ROMs. Even with stable builds of something as nice as Cyanogenmod, they tend to never work 100% (e.g. Nook HD+ with CM 10.x vs. any Nexus tab) and have a bunch of little goofy things you have to be able to accept because you bought an eReader hoping it would be an awesome cheap tablet.kmmatney - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
I will second that - I have both an iPad2 and a rooted Nook HD+. The screen on the Nook HD+ is good, but Cyanogenmod still has enough bugs to degrade the overall experience. And no matter what, rooting is always a pain in the butt. I learned not to use nightly builds, as one of them bricked by device, and I had to revert back to an older build.I also Jailbroke my iPad, but there wasn't really much of a need, so just went back to stock with iOS 7. The iPad2 is just a better device than the Nook HD+, despite the lower screen resolution.
Lizbeth - Sunday, November 3, 2013 - link
adding google play to amazaon hd/hdx is fairly simple and you don't need a custom rom, just root it and install the app for the google store...Guspaz - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
The Kindle is also a smaller tablet in terms of screen size, so that's not really a valid comparison... You're looking at 45.2 sqin for the iPad while only 35.6 sqin for the Kindle HDX.If you scale the iPad Air's weight by the difference in screen size, you get almost the exact same weight as the Kindle HDX (within 5 grams), indicating that a scaled down iPad Air or a scaled up Kindle HDX would match up very closely.
KoolAidMan1 - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
The Kindle HDX is lighter because it is plastic, the display isn't properly calibrated like the iPad's, the hardware is much slower, and its software is limited.You get what you pay for,
Spunjji - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
Everything you just said is factually inaccurate bar the software part. But don't let that stop you saying it! ;)