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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tralalalalalala40 - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
If you want to tinker and fix something that keeps breaking (some people like to do that, that's why there is a used car market), then android is for you. This is changing every day and the two are converging as google makes android (the one you use) more and more closed source to leave aosp behind :)IUU - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
"If you want to tinker and fix something that keeps breaking.."So, are you that disappointed with your ipad?
And what will you do with a device that never breaks but can't do anything with it;even this little thing, that is, proper communication between the user and the machine is out of the question with the ipad. I remember trying to be patient when testing an ipad for a whole week(god I have such a big patience) and trying to avoid the spontaneous urge to bang my head on the wall every five minutes or so.
So, I didn't reply reasonably to you because you made a ridiculous comment, but it is true that I still try to forget the traumatic experience I had with the ipad. The only good thing about buying one is that raises the value of your Apple stocks.
tralalalalalala40 - Thursday, November 13, 2014 - link
iOS 8 on the newest devices is amazing. With full Microsoft support and further enterprise support, the device is becoming more and more of a productivity device. If you have an iPad 3 or below, I feel your pain.Galidou - Friday, November 14, 2014 - link
I don't know what kind of traumatic experience you can have with an iPad... unless you'Re a very big tech newbie. I'm with everyone here that I don't want to fix anything that's broken. I had to constantly work around bugs and problems on my Asus Transformer TF201. I bought an iPad 4 about 2 years ago, never plugged it in a computer and does everything I need from a tablet plus the screen, camera, OS responsiveness, stability and so on beats any android devices I've owned.My girlfriend has 2 ipod touch that still work wonders, she bought an android phone, and as good as it is and she likes it, there's a virus on it and as soon as it uses the home network, my upload goes crazy. Now I have to buy an antivirus or restore the thing. Never it has happened on her iPods touch.
I've had one problem with an iPod touch it was under warranty, made a request to have it repaired, received a bos in which the iPod did fit like a glove didn'T cost me a penny back and forth one week later I had a brand new iPod touch. Not much to say, best experience I've had to deal with any piece of technology I've owned.
akdj - Thursday, November 27, 2014 - link
My two year old son uses an iPad. I'm sorry u weren't able to figure it outNEDM64 - Sunday, November 9, 2014 - link
Boys trying to look like men.If you want to get deep, you won't be arguing about iOS or android, both are toys for kids, you would be instead arguing for tektronix vs Agilent for your next oscilloscope.
extide - Monday, November 10, 2014 - link
Screw Tektronics, they haven't been innovating in the last 10 years or so. All of their scopes are SO SLOW!! It's either Agilent or LeCroy :) Also Rigol is a great choice for lower budgets.blackcrayon - Friday, November 7, 2014 - link
"almost all technical people prefer Android."citation needed.
There are tons of technical people who prefer iOS, hell, look how many iOS app developers there are. The other side of the coin is, the vast majority of customers of any computing device are not technical anyway.
Jumangi - Saturday, November 8, 2014 - link
How many iOS developers there are has nothing to do with them "liking it more". They go there because of the money.akdj - Monday, November 10, 2014 - link
Makes sensePeople buy, come back and buy again ...and continue to use one of their hundreds of thousands of tablet optimized iOS apps
Ever look at the dismal 'app selection' in the Play Store for your tablet?
Maybe I should say 'lack of selection'
Sad, but yeah...I'd consider pilots, surgeons, Boeing and 95% of the Fortune 500 'customers of any computing device aren't technical anyway.'
Ridiculous
Ignorant
Try one. I enjoy both. But Android for very specific needs. iOS covers literally EVERY base