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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doobydoo - Friday, November 15, 2013 - link
The hardware in the HDX is slower, and it is finished in plastic. So which part was inaccurate?melgross - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
There is no such thing as 100% RGB gamut. Which gamut are you talking about? sRGB? Adobe 1998 RGB? Pro RGB? There are a lot of RGB standards out there.Theard - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
what Cindy implied I didn't even know that people can earn $6894 in four weeks on the computer. look at this site ... jobs23.comLizbeth - Sunday, November 3, 2013 - link
and is several price points less that the ipad airKrysto - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
> is probably the higher clocked Z3770I don't see that in any tablets today, let alone smartphones. So don't say it like that, as if it's already happened. As it is, Intel's chips aren't very competitive, in both CPU and GPU performance.
> while Qualcomm will probably pass Apple's GPU early next year.
They are equal right now, at least in smartphones. The others, perhaps with the exception of Nvidia, don't really make separate "tablet chips". They make one chip for both smartphones and tablets.
Speedfriend - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
"As it is, Intel's chips aren't very competitive, in both CPU"You obviously have a problem reading, given the Transformer T100 which is very close to the iPhone 5S and iPad Air in the benchmarks above, uses the Atom Z3740, which is only the second fastest. So the Z3770, which is clocked 33% higher, should be at least equal if not better than A7 in CPU benchmarks.
How in your mind that equates to not competitive I don't know..
Homeles - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
Not to mention that a lot of A7's strength isn't in the silicon, it's in the software stack on top of it. All of the CPU benchmarks are done through the stock web browser -- that's something Apple can fine tune, while Intel cannot. Therefore, the A7 outperforming Atom doesn't point to Atom being weaker at a silicon level, and instead shows the advantages of being able to hand tune your OS and applications and squeeze more out of your hardware.raptorious - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
I'll give you one reason: the fact that Anand omitted the iPad 4 from the latency graph in the "An Update on Apple’s A7: It's Better Than I Thought" page. Why is the iPad 4 in the bandwidth graph and not in the latency graph. I'll tell you why: because the iPad 4 has better latency and Anand doesn't want to make the A7 look bad, so he left it out. No bias? Right.syedjalalt - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
Apple iPad is a great product. No doubt. The word selection for writing such important reviews has been good here. IF you go The Verge and see the iPad review, you will notice how biased and predictable they have become. Nilay Patel doesn't know anything. The guys @verge always mock Android and especially Samsung.Last year's Nexus 4's review score had 8 for camera and 9 for ecosystem(as far as I remember). This year, ecosystem is 8 and camera is 5. Great!!!1
doobydoo - Friday, November 15, 2013 - link
Yep it's ridiculous that the Nexus 4 got 8 for camera. Should have been 3/4.Ecosystem scores can vary over time so don't see the problem there. Android hasn't moved on much in the past year.