The Apple iPad 2 Review
by Brian Klug, Anand Lal Shimpi & Vivek Gowri on March 19, 2011 8:01 PM ESTCamera Connection Kit
We’ve had a few requests to double check and see whether the iPad’s original camera connection kit works, and sure enough it still does. We put together a simple yet representative benchmark comparing how fast it took an iPad 1 and iPad 2 to import 40 NEF (Nikon RAW, lossless compression enabled) photos shot using a Nikon D300s.
The iPad 2 bests the iPad 1 by a considerable margin at import speed, it's 47 percent faster. Subjectively, initial image previews also rendered much, much quicker on the iPad 2.
I always felt like speed was honestly what kept me from using the camera connection kit more than once in a blue moon on the original iPad, coupled with the relatively limited 16 GB of storage on the WiFi model I opted for. Though this time around I still went with 16 GB, it’s now fast enough to import a substantial number of photos even from the most competent of cameras very quickly.
The other gems that are enabled by the USB Host port bundled with the camera connector kit also still work. You can still connect a keyboard and use it as an input device wherever text fields are, mice still don’t work (not a huge surprise there), and 16-bit USB audio class devices work.
I connected my Logitech USB headset and microphone combo to the iPad through the camera connector kit. Audio played back through the headsets from all applications. In apps that use recording, the microphone also worked.
The interesting caveat is that you apparently can’t use both at the same time, at least not this pair. I fired up FaceTime in the hopes that I’d be able to use the headsets in their entirety - callers could hear me through the microphone (and noted I sounded excellent), however audio played back through the iPad’s internal speaker instead of the headphones. I connected through a powered hub and experienced the same thing. There are anecdotal accounts that other devices which support simultaneous audio input and output do work, but I lack more hardware to test with. Additionally, I can’t test whether devices with higher power budgets (like the Blue Yeti microphone for example) work.
There’s definitely potential for the iPad 2 to be a shockingly competent mobile podcasting platform, especially coupled with some built-in Garage Band editing.
You can already record audio through a USB source natively in Garage Band with the camera connector kit. We tested it and it sounds excellent.
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Azethoth - Monday, March 21, 2011 - link
No! 22 seconds is not fast enough. That is 20 seconds wasted each time you do that in a day.benonemusic - Monday, March 21, 2011 - link
Excellent writing and content as usual. As a longtime reader (this is my first post) with an editorial eye, I had a suggestion for future articles such as this with multiple authors but in which the main review is written in the first person singular. It was slightly disorienting to see three authors (Brian, Anand, Vivek) but then much of the article written with "I" (presumably Anand), you might want to avoid listing all three authors as "ands" in that case. One idea would be make the first author the one who is speaking in the first person voice (presumably Anand in the case) and the other two to be listed as "with." If the review is written as "we" then having all three of the authors as "ands" makes sense. There are multiple solutions. You can simply keep the "ands" and then indicate who the "I" is in the first instance. You could obviously say "one of us" in the first instance and indicate "Anand" in parentheses. And so on. Sorry for going on this long, but I'm big on bylines. Keep up the great work with the articles!embeddedGPU - Monday, March 21, 2011 - link
Can you clarify the floating point precision for your GPU GFLOPS figures ? You mention 20-/32-bit for nVidia, but I think the SGX is only 16-bit precision. If so, it's not a totally fair comparison...wellortech - Monday, March 21, 2011 - link
"If you fell in love with the original iPad, the iPad 2 is a significant upgrade."Really? Since when is thinner and a crappy camera a significant upgrade?
mcnabney - Monday, March 21, 2011 - link
You guys missed noticing something when documenting the huge step forward with the iPad2 GPU power.We now have iOS fragmentation.
The entire iPad1 generation was obsoleted in the graphics department. Now developers have to choose between writing for the iPad1 or iPad2. There is far too large of a gulf between the two platforms. To benefit from the GPU advancement, the massive installed base of the iPad1 will have to be written-off.
kmmatney - Monday, March 21, 2011 - link
I don't think this is true. First, we are only talking about 2 models, and second, they can just enable more graphics features for iPad 2. I can see where some truly advanced games might only be written for the iPad 2 in the future, but there is really no way to avoid that.Azethoth - Monday, March 21, 2011 - link
There always was and always will be iOS fragmentation since the 2nd iDevice shipped.As for what it means in a practical sense: check out Infinity Blade on multiple devices (iPhone and iPad). See, not a big deal, content providers are used to scaling artwork and design.
Furthermore, iOS will suffer less from this than Android (fewer device specs). It is one of the aspects of the competition at this form factor that makes me think that Apple will do better than it does at the PC level. (Not that Apple PC profits are not insanely good for their industry: over 50% of entire industry by some accounting).
araczynski - Monday, March 21, 2011 - link
if you're after a notebook/pc replacement, you're kidding yourself with any tablet.if you're after a gaming device, you're golden :) especially if you think gaming on phone sized screens (this includes psp/ds/etc) is plain stupid.
mine is filled to the brim with games, no room for audio/video/etc, just pure games.
i love it, my daughter loves it, even my technophobe wife loves it.
its for entertainment, nothing more.
Azethoth - Monday, March 21, 2011 - link
It is for more than entertainment:You can amuse your cat with it as well!
coolio68 - Monday, March 21, 2011 - link
Great review Anand,regarding this comment though:'The real competition for the SGX 543MP2 will be NVIDIA's Kal-El. That part is expected to ship on time and will feature a boost in core count: from 8 to 12. The ratio of pixel to vertex shader cores is not known at this point but I'm guessing it won't be balanced anymore. NVIDIA is promising 3x the GPU performance out of Kal-El so I suspect that we'll see an increase in throughput per core.'
Worth bearing in mind a couple of things:
SGX 543MP can already incorporate 2 to 16 cores
The even higher performance SGX 554MP cores have also been announced in December
Power VR Series 6 (Rogue), the next-generation, can scale from 210 GFLOPS to 8 TFLOPS , and is already licensed by the usual suspects.
The A9600 chip announced by ST-E at MWC ,containing Rogue, is sampling in H2 2011.
Nvidia are gonna have their work cut out methinks, but the competition is great for the industry and consumers.