The Apple iPad Review (2012)
by Vivek Gowri & Anand Lal Shimpi on March 28, 2012 3:14 PM ESTWiFi & GPS
The WiFi stack gets an update with the new iPad courtesy of Broadcom's 65nm BCM4330, compared to the BCM4329 used in the previous two iPads. Both 2.4GHz and 5GHz operation are supported, although as I mentioned earlier the carrier-dependent personal hotspot is only available over 2.4GHz.
As with most smartphone/tablet designs the BCM4330 only supports a single spatial stream, for a maximum link speed of 72Mbps. Similar to the iPad 2, Apple hides the WiFi antenna behind the speaker grille at the bottom of the tablet. The cellular antennas (there are now two) are at the top of the tablet, behind the plastic RF window.
| WiFi Performance Comparison | ||||||
| Distance from AP | 3 feet | 20 feet (Different Room) | 50 feet (Different Room/Floor) | 100 feet (Different Room) | ||
| ASUS TF Prime (2.4GHz) | 26.9 Mbps | 9.85 Mbps | 13.5 Mbps | 2.20 Mbps | ||
| Apple iPad 2 (2.4GHz) | 35.1 Mbps | 29.9 Mbps | 26.9 Mbps | 10.6 Mbps | ||
| Apple iPad 3 (2.4GHz) | 35.1 Mbps | 29.9 Mbps | 27.9 Mbps | 9.98 Mbps | ||
| Apple iPad 2 (5GHz) | 36.7 Mbps | 36.7 Mbps | 36.7 Mbps | 11.9 Mbps | ||
| Apple iPad 3 (5GHz) | 36.7 Mbps | 36.7 Mbps | 36.7 Mbps | 11.7 Mbps | ||
With a similar WiFi stack and similar antenna placement, it's no surprise that I noticed very similar WiFi performance to the iPad 2.
The same goes for GPS performance between the new iPad and the iPad 2. Both devices were able to lock and track me driving around in a car with comparable accuracy from what I could tell.
Airplay Support with the new Apple TV
When paired with a second or third generation Apple TV, the iPad supports wireless display mirroring or content streaming to the iPad via AirPlay. In other words, if you have an Apple TV hooked up to your HDTV, you can use your HDTV as a large, mirrored, secondary display for your iPad—wirelessly. The only requirement is that you have a 2nd or 3rd generation Apple TV and that it's on the same network as your iPad. With those requirements met, enabling AirPlay mirroring is simple—just bring up the iOS task switcher, swipe left to right until you see the brightness/playback controls and tap the AirPlay icon.
Mirroring gives you exactly what you'd expect—a complete mirror of everything you see on the local iPad screen. All sounds are also sent over and come out via your TV's speakers—the local speaker remains silent.
The frame rate isn't as high on the remote display, but there's virtually no impact to the performance of the iPad itself. There's noticeable latency of course since the display output is transcoded as a video, sent over WiFi to the Apple TV, decoded and displayed on your TV via HDMI. I measured the AirPlay latency at ms, which is reasonable for browsing the web but too high for any real-time games. If you want to use the iPad to drive your HDTV for gaming you'll need to buy the optional HDMI output dongle.
While AirPlay mirroring on the iPad works at 720p, if you're playing a 1080p movie on the new iPad and you have a 3rd generation Apple TV, the video is also displayed in 1080p rather than downscaled to 720p.
Video playback is an interesting use case for AirPlay and the iPad. If you don't have mirroring enabled, you can actually start playing a movie on the iPad, have it stream to your TV via the Apple TV, and go about using your iPad as if nothing else was happening. Most apps will allow you to stream video in the background without interrupting, however some games (e.g. GTA 3, Infinity Blade 2) and some apps (e.g. iMovie) will insist on streaming their UI to your Apple TV instead.
Although iOS and the iPad don't do a great job of promoting multi-user experiences, using AirPlay to push video to a TV wirelessly is an exception. If you frequently load your iPad up with movies you can use it to keep others entertained while you either get work done or just goof around on your iPad at the same time. It's a great fit for families where people want to do two different things. If you do put a lot of movies on your iPhone/iPad, the 3rd generation Apple TV is probably a must buy for this reason alone.
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jjj - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - link
Testing battery life only in web browsing ? Maybve that would be ok for a 100$ device.As it is the battery tests are prety poor,you do video playback when every SoC out there has a dedicated decode unit and that test is only representative for vid playback.Here the most important test should have been battery life when both GPU and CPU are loaded and not including that seems like an intentional omission to avoid makiing the device look bad.There are a lot of other things to say about the review,too many but one thing has to be said.
This is a plan B or plan C device.The screen is the selling point,is what had to go in,they didn't had 28/32nm in time and had to go for a heavier,thicker,hotter device with a huge chip (CPU speed is limited most likely by heat not so much power consumption,ofc both are directly related).Apple had to make way too many compromises to fit in the screen,no way this was plan A.
tipoo - Thursday, March 29, 2012 - link
I would have liked a gaming battery life test as well.PeteH - Thursday, March 29, 2012 - link
Beyond even that, I'd like to see a worst-case battery life (i.e. gaming, max brightness, LTE up, etc).Also, it'd be really interesting to see how brightness impacts battery life. Maybe the web browsing test at 20%, 40%, 60%, 80%, and 100% brightness. Of course that would probably delay the review by several days, so it might not be worth it.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, March 29, 2012 - link
We did a max brightness test, however a gaming test would be appropriate as well. I will see if I can't run some of that in the background while I work on things for next week :)Take care,
Anand
SimpleLance - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - link
The biggest drain for the battery comes from the display. So, if the iPad will be used for hotspot only (with display turned off), you will get a lot of hours from it because it has such a huge battery.But then, using the the iPad just for a hotspot would be a waste of that gorgeous display.
Very nice review of a very nice product.
thrawn3 - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - link
Am I the only one that feels the max brightness is more important in day to day use of a highly portable device than DPI and color accuracy?I absolutely would love to have all of these three be excellent but I think for a tablet or small laptop Max Brightness and DPI are higher priority than color accuracy. This is exactly what the ASUS Transformer Infinity is supposed to be but I would prefer it on a real laptop.
I care about color accuracy too but I am perfectly fine with needing a desktop monitor and trading brightness there since it is in a stable environment until we hit the technological level that will allow all these elements to be combined. Maybe quantum dot display technology in the future?
One thing I have to give all these new displays is that they FINALLY have gotten the wide viewing angles thing right and I will be so happy to get this into the rest of the market.
seapeople - Tuesday, April 3, 2012 - link
Would you really prefer a bright 1366x768 TN panel with 200 contrast ratio on a 15" laptop over a less bright IPS Ipad screen with much better resolution, DPI, color accuracy, and viewing angle?vision33r - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - link
The screen is really gorgeous when you shoot raw with any DSLR and view it in iPhoto.ol1bit - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - link
I just bought a Asus Transformer Prime, and your review was spot on with what I decided. I can not live with IOS and using Android for 3 years.Just the simple stuff was my decision:
1. Freedom of Android, file transfers, etc. No Itunes requirement.
2. MicroSD
3. Kewl keyboard
4. Live Wallpaper.
5. A real desktop, separate from my applications.
6. 32GB versus 16GB
7. Gorilla Glass (yes, true. My original droid lived in my pocket 2 years no scratches, my HTC Rezound scratches the first 2 weeks).
8. Asus (love their MBs)
9. Nivida (love their GPUs)
What I will miss:
1. Ipad 3 Display.
darkcrayon - Thursday, March 29, 2012 - link
1. iTunes is no longer ever needed for an iOS device. I consider the option of a first party desktop sync solution to be an advantage now that it's not a requirement.7. It seems likely the new iPad uses Gorilla Glass or Gorilla Glass 2...
9. Odd that you'd love nVidia's GPUs when they've been pretty much the bottom of the performance barrel for ARM device graphics, even excluding Apple's SoCs (which have lately been using the fastest GPUs in the industry by far).