The Apple iPad Air 2 Review
by Joshua Ho on November 7, 2014 9:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Tablets
- Apple
- Mobile
- iOS
- ipad Air 2
Battery Life
With the move from featurephones to smartphones, battery life has been and continues to be a critical issue. While it wasn’t unusual to see a week or more of battery life on a featurephone, some of the earliest smartphones couldn’t even last a day. While tablets seem to have a much easier time achieving high levels of battery life by virtue of massively increased volume, they still face similar issues as they are often used for gaming or other more intensive workloads that a smartphone is unlikely to see nearly as often. In order to test this, we run our tablets through a standard suite of tests of various use cases. In all cases where the display is on, all displays are calibrated to a brightness of 200 nits to draw useful relative comparisons.
In our first test, we see that the iPad Air 2 is about roughly equivalent to the original iPad Air for WiFi web browsing. This is actually a bit surprising as the battery in the iPad Air 2 is approximately 84% of the iPad Air. This would mean that we would expect the iPad Air 2 to get around 8.4 hours of battery life in this test, which represents a 16% gain to efficiency. It’s likely that these improvements to battery life come from the new process node on the A8X, along with the newer WiFi module.
Along the same lines, the LTE web browsing test tracks quite closely but it seems that there’s a minor decrease in efficiency gains when compared to WiFi. This difference is likely to be explained by the much higher bandwidth available in WiFi when compared to LTE.
While the web browsing tests are effective at ensuring faster SoCs aren’t punished, this inherently tilts battery life towards a more display-bound mode rather than compute-bound. Unfortunately short of a jailbreak it doesn’t seem possible to get an effective Basemark OS II battery test, so we’re mostly limited to a test of GFXBench’s unlimited rundown.
As one can see, the iPad Air 2 is one of the best performers on this test, considering its frame rate and runtime. While NVIDIA's GK20A GPU in Tegra K1 can get close to the GX6650 for short periods of time, over a long workload it's pretty clear that the GX6650 on 20nm has better sustained performance and significantly superior efficiency as it doesn't throttle until the 200th iteration of the test. It's important to note that the iPad Air 2 is running at a higher native resolution here, so relative to SHIELD Tablet a scaling factor needs to be estimated in order to get an idea for performance at the same resolution. During this test I saw that the skin temperatures never exceeded 45C, so this isn't the result of Apple choosing to run the device hotter than most.
Charge Time
While tablets deliver some great battery life in general, charge time tends to be much slower than that of smartphones as the battery is much larger and charging the device isn't as time critical due to the longer battery life . While we can't quite cover the full range of battery life uses cases, it's important to remember that in cases where the platform is otherwise identical beyond display that battery life scales linearly with overall capacity. In order to test charge time, we measure the time it takes for the battery to reach 100% from a fully-depleted state.
As one can see, the smaller battery seems to have a noticeable impact on charge time, although the difference isn't really all that notable as the difference is only around ten minutes at the end of the day.
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darkich - Saturday, November 8, 2014 - link
What a disaapointing review.After all of this waiting I was expecting some deep chip architecture dive, something we havent read in other reviews ,but NOTHING here came across as new and interesting.
Also, it was written rather poorly ,with a lot of grammar mistakes and bad, half hearted sentence structure.
And this was supposed to be the review highlight of the year on AT.
wyewye - Saturday, November 8, 2014 - link
Joshua, this article is horrible:1. Extended use of "aforementioned" when refering to stuff you dont know and already mentioned, like some magic "arhitectural" benefits.
2. There is no need to inflate the article by saying the same thing over and over again.
3. "In the basic definition of a tablet, the iPad Air 2 definitely fits." - No shit sherlock the ipad is a tablet - what is this, retard bingo?
4. You randomly switch sorting order of the graphs so the better is no longer on top, conveniently when Apple performs weaker.
5. On every set of tests that Ipad Air 2 performed mid to low compared to competition, you still present a missleading summary that Ipad was the best.
6. For every weakness of the iPad Air 2, you try to find excuses.
Yes the iPad has both advantages and disadtantages. Try to maintain some reasonable level of objectivity, there are way too many fanboi "reviews" out there.
Since when AnandTech does asskissing "reviews"? Bring back Anand before the site dies!
konradsa - Saturday, November 8, 2014 - link
Disgruntled Nexus 9 owner? :-)konradsa - Saturday, November 8, 2014 - link
A lot of people at the mac rumors forum are complaining about a) distortion on screen when pushing on back and b) excessive vibration due to speakers when watching movies or playing games. Bad enough many are returning them again.Can you comment on that? Could you compare the cellular and Wi-Fi versions and see if they behave differently with respect to a) or b)?
JoshHo - Saturday, November 8, 2014 - link
I can confirm that both of those are present on the cellular version that we were sampled, but distortion from pressing on the back is something that I've noticed on multiple devices this year. The vibration effects are definitely strong but this really isn't an issue.Morawka - Sunday, November 9, 2014 - link
in order to create distortion from pushing on the back, you have to put significant force on my ipad air 2 wifi 64gbYour not going to see distortion just holding it and moving it around, or swapping hands. You have to actually try and push hard.
mrex - Wednesday, November 12, 2014 - link
sorry, but that was the first thing i noticed when i picked up the device. Swapping or even moving my hands positions caused distortions on the screen. I checked both units in the store and both suffered this issue. i dont know about the vibration, because there were too many people to test the sound quality. the distortion was enough for me and didnt buy it. ill check later if apple has fixed it (secrectly as they do). but now, its only place is on a table at a store...tralalalalalala40 - Thursday, November 13, 2014 - link
Any case will dampen that. You use cases to keep the ridiculously high resale value...mrex - Saturday, November 8, 2014 - link
the lack of info makes me wonder, if anandtech site is just another bitch in apples stall nowadays. no mention the strong vibration... no mention screen distortions which is visible and terrible when keeping it on your hands. it is time to remove anandtech site from the serious reviewers list... seems to be too much connection with apple nowadays to be able to do trusted reviews? :/Ilias78 - Saturday, November 8, 2014 - link
Anand became an Apple employee - what did you expect, negative reviews from Anandtech? No way