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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Fx1 - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
The only issue i have with this review is that you took 10 whole pages to basically review the same ipad that has been around for years which is just slightly faster and slimmer than last years. Its a locked down boring tablet for kiddy users.Streamlined - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
That's funny because I'm a financial analyst and the most popular tablet among professionals who use their tablet for WORK in Fortune 500 level companies is the ipad.darkcrayon - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link
Right, the tablet with the most compelling apps and arguably the most powerful hardware is surely boring and for kiddy users. By your laughable standard, pretty much any computer in any category is the same as the last several.gattacaDNA - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
As far as I know, Apple has not begun printing US currency. So everyone is entitled to spend their $ on whatever tablet or other device strokes their fancy / fantasies. All this lambasting and "mine's bigger than yours" is a childish waste of time. Nearly every review in every medium has some sort of bias. Hell you demonstrate bias every day when you choose who to eat a meal with - get over it. Buy what devices you want and the market and stock prices will decide what futures are delivered - all are viable until proven otherwise. Peace.gnx - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
1 lbs is the threshold for easy to hold in hand. I felt so after using a iPad and a Galaxy Tab 10.1 and then Galaxy Tab 8.9 and iPad2.In terms of form factor, personally, I though Samsung already had the best product in 2011 with the Galaxy Tab 8.9: screen real estate comparable to an iPad/iPad2 (the same height in portrait, just a bit more compact in width) but lighter and thinner (under 1 lbs). So I was dismayed to see Samsung not follow up with a successor to the Galaxy Tab 8.9, while Apple went for heavier and thicker with iPad3 & iPad4. Smaller tablets like the Galaxy Tab 7.7, Nexus 7 and iPad Mini (7.9)/Galaxy Note 8.0 all sacrificed screen space too much, for someone like me who reads a lot of documents on them.
Personally, cause I'm frustrated with the lack of widgets on iOS, I am partial to Android. But if Google or Samsung or Asus don't come up with a 8.9 or 10.1 under 1lbs, the iPad Air may be my only choice for an upgrade .....
Death666Angel - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Amazon HDX 8.9" not for you? :) The software does have issues, but it checks all the right boxes. Might work for you. Either the last one for price and good-enough performance of this years with higher prices (still lower than iPad) and higher performance, better specs to go with it.gnx - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link
I also love the form factor of the Kindle HDX 8.9 - superb dimensions and weight in my opinion. But I have to sadly admit I am also tied to several google apps, namely, gmail, google voice, google calendar and a few others, and though both iOS and Android provide support, forked Amazon Fire OS doesn't ... this is more Google's call than Amazon's fault, but admittedly, it limits my choice to an iPad or Nexus/Samsung/Asus etc ...solipsism - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link
Comparable? The Galaxy 8.9 is closer to the display are of the iPad MINI than to the iPad (Air).Death666Angel - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link
If my math isn't wrong and the screen size calculator I used is correct (on draperin.com), then the HDX 8.9" has 231cm² display surface, the iPad Mini 172cm² and the iPad Air 243cm², which seems to invalidate your statement.thunng8 - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link
Your math is wrong. Not sure if you accounted for different aspects ratiosBy my calculations (LxW=Area (cm^2):
iPad mini=16x12=192
Fire HDX=19.15x12=230
iPad Air=19.7x14.8=292