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Gorgeous design; thinner and lighter than last model; tri-core CPU screams; double RAM of last model; long battery life; excellent photography for a tablet; fingerprint recognition; excellent selection of apps; still easy to use
Drawbacks will be subjective, such as a less open app ecosystem; lacks 60fps video capture of iPhone line; speaker quality reduced versus predecessor
Apple's new iPad Air 2 feature's the company's first tri-core CPU running at
1.5GHz, double the RAM (2GB) of the original iPad Air, a massive performance increase, significantly improved
photography capabilities, a larger battery, an improved display,
fingerprint recognition and in a body that's thinner and lighter than last year's model. No wonder WIRED's Nate Lanxon has enjoyed the last five days reviewing it.
Our review of Apple's first iPad Air was notable for two reasons: first, it earned a perfect ten-out-of-ten rating; but also, it was the first product upon which we bestowed such an unblemished score. To us, it was the epitome of tablet perfection in 2013. With the release of the iPad Air 2, Apple has maintained the attractive £399 price but has given the design, internal specifications and software a significant upgrade.
So there are two questions: is it still a perfect tablet? And if it is, does it warrant an upgrade from last year's model?
Design
We praised the iPad Air's slender profile last year, citing its 30 percent and 20 percent reduction in weight and thickness respectively over the iPad 4 as reasons why it felt like "a markedly different product". The iPad Air 2 is thinner still, measuring 6.1 mm thick -- a full 1.4 mm skinnier than the original Air. The difference is immediately noticeable, although less so than the iPad Air was versus the iPad 4. In the case of the previous generational transition, Apple redesigned and shrunk down the entire chassis of its tablet to achieve a dramatic shift in aesthetic. This time it has achieved an admirable improvement, but the difference this makes is not as profound as previous revisions.
Apple's 6.1 mm iPad Air 2 is the thinnest tablet we've ever reviewed, beating the Sony Xperia Z2 Tablet by 0.3 mm. Its sleek profile belies the rigidity afforded by the aluminium and glass construction. It's thin but it is sturdy. And no, it does not bend.
Certain aspects of the iPad Air 2's design are particularly worthy of note, however: despite the reduction in depth, Apple has maintained the same excellent battery life. Our battery tests are still ongoing at the time of publication but anecdotally we saw no difference -- positively or negatively -- on the power front. This, despite the fact that Apple has actually increased the battery capacity by 19 percent, from 27.3 watt hours to 32.4 watt hours. A major change to the CPU, noted later in this review, may account for this increase not translating to increased battery longevity.
Apple quotes ten hours of web browsing on Wi-Fi, watching video or listening to music. This is fair. But we achieved far beyond ten hours just listening to music with Wi-Fi disabled, for example. On the other hand, recording HD video and playing 3D games will eat into that battery after just a few hours -- much less if shooting slow-mo video, which eats battery life particularly quickly indeed.
For average use you can expect to only need to charge the device every other evening.
Another improved physical aspect is the inclusion of Apple's TouchID fingerprint sensor in the home button. In our review of the iPad Air, the lack of the TouchID tech seen on last year's iPhone was, while not a deal-breaker, an absence worthy of mention. "It's a shame this feature hasn't made it across [from the iPhone 5s]," we said, citing that tablets living largely at home, as well as apps not yet utilising the security of fingerprints, as reasons for its dismissal from Apple's design concept. But with iOS 8, fingerprints can be used for many apps -- Evernote allows it for unlocking secure notepad databases, 1Password for permitting access to encrypted website credentials -- and as such it's time the iPad saw that benefit. It works as it does on the iPhone: easy to set up, very reliable recognition in use. It's not flawless (damp fingers cause recognition issues), but they are idiosyncrasies that favour 100 percent certainty the finger in use belongs to the hand of the rightful owner.
The final note on design concerns the screen. Apple has reduced the air between the panel its pixels sit within and the glass above it, giving an impression your fingers are touching the icons themselves. The screen is also less reflective. Apple claimed about a 50 percent reduction in reflectiveness, and although it's hard to determine whether this figure is accurate we definitely noticed a reduction, and a black-and-white photograph reveals the iPad Air 2 (right) to have a darker reflection than the original Air (left).
There are a couple of small but notable casualties resulting from Apple's assault on thickness. The first is the physical rotation lock or mute switch. This used to sit above the volume buttons on the right-hand side of the iPad Air, but it now lays in a grave marked "relic" along with the iPod classic, translucent Macs and, er, iTunes Ping. The second casualty is speaker quality. In our tests listening to some classic Dragonforce (that's British heavy metal, for the uninitiated), we heard similar levels of output volume from both iPad Air models, but the original Air had deeper bass in its reproduction. This is undoubtedly to do with the use of either smaller internal speakers, or simply that there was more actual air inside the Air to infuse with audible vibrations. For real bass you'll just have to buy a pair of Beats headphones, which we're sure Apple will happily help you with.
The exterior of Apple's new tablet reflects a level of beauty our colleagues on VOGUE expect from high-calibre catwalks. But to us at WIRED it is the internals that have seen the largest upgrade. In fact, we haven't seen performance improvements in the iPad this great for some time.
Apple's latest model is measurably the fastest iPad to date, leaps above the last generation and further leaps over the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. There's so much power on offer here it's difficult even to find ways to max it out. We would imagine most users with an iPad Air are not necessarily utilising every ounce of power on offer in that model, and so may not at the point of release see a significant jump in speed right out of the box.
Owners of an iPad 4 and older still will, and in fact we measured an increase of performance greater than 200 percent between the iPad Air 2 and the iPad 4.
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One area more visibly improved is how quickly an app running in the background is forced to quit so that the iPad can move memory to a currently active app. You will have run into this bottleneck if you have ever been reading a webpage in Safari, then using a few other apps, returning later to Safari and seeing it reload your recently opened tabs. This is because the phone needed to divert memory away from Safari to operate your other apps, thus needs to reload the webpage in question back into memory. This is less likely to occur on the iPad Air 2 as the memory has been doubled.
High-end games generally eat system resources most obviously and titles like Gameloft's Asphalt 8 and Modern Combat 5 still take the gold for being the best-looking. They perform very similarly on the new iPad as they did on the last one. That is to say they are console-level gaming experiences, but we haven't yet found a game that performs worse on an iPad Air than it does on the Air 2. We'll look forward to doing so though, because the performance on offer is undeniable when you consider the numbers we discovered. (For readers satisfied with the above performance explanation, skip to the next section of this review -- Photography and Cameras. For readers looking for more granular explanations of hardware, continue this section for technical comparisons.)
The brains behind the brawn
Last year Apple used its A7 processor inside the iPad Air. It was a dual-core 1.4GHz processor backed by 1GB of RAM -- a specification first introduced for the iPhone 5s. This year Apple has expanded the technological gap between its flagship phone and tablet. The iPad Air 2 has its CPU cores running at 1.5GHz -- except now it has three of them, up from two; RAM has been doubled from 1GB to 2GB.
It is this improvement, Apple claimed, that resulted in a 40 percent improvement in processing power over last year's model, and 2.5 times the graphical power improvement for 3D games and image processing. With our sceptical eyebrow raised, we gave the iPad Air 2 an extensive test to assess its performance capability, and we can conclude it has desktop-class processing capabilities in line with Apple's lofty promises.
Using the GeekBench 3 suite to measure overall performance, the iPad Air 2 scored 4,484 using all of its cores. This is indeed 40 percent higher than last year's model, which scored 2,693 in the same test. Over the iPad 4, the iPad Air 2 offers a 214 percent improvement in overall performance potential. Safe to say that if horsepower is your addiction, Apple's stable has the thoroughbred.
We saw similar results for CPU performance using the Antutu benchmark, under which the iPad Air 2 scored 62,728 versus the iPad Air's 40,514. This eclipses everything we've seen under the Antutu tests until now. But the improvements continue when we change focus to graphical capabilities.
Using Antutu's GPU benchmark -- which makes the iPad render a scene from a 3D video game with complex visuals -- we measured a total score of 14,306 for the iPad Air 2 verses 6,584 on the iPad Air. That is drawn partly from the iPad Air 2 being able to render an average 60 frames per second, while the iPad Air managed a 25 frames per second average.
In short, Apple's claims of serious performance improvements seem fair and offer the potential for massive improvements in 3D gaming and image processing. How many apps and games will take advantage of this at launch may be few, but as an investment, the iPad Air 2 offers a more substantial performance package if a user is looking to buy a tablet and use it for several years.
It is also worth noting that with iOS 8 Apple introduced a new technology called Metal. Unrelated to the mention of British rockers Dragonforce earlier, Metal allows the iPad and iPhone to dramatically increase the performance of 3D graphics without maxing out the processor. It's likely that under iOS 8 and Metal, the A8X processor offers an even more significant boost in performance than we're yet able to confidently measure. Next year's expected iPad revision will make this observation more quantifiable.
Photography and cameras
One of the areas most obviously improved is the rear camera on the iPad Air 2. It has seen an increase to 8 megapixels, up from 5 megapixels on the original Air; and the image processing technology has been transferred from the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus to the Air 2.
This latter point is arguably more important than the former, as it is the iPad's ability to process the data captured by the camera's lens and sensor that determines how clear the resulting image is.
We praised Apple's advances with photography in the latest iPhones, and the iPad Air 2 benefits greatly here too.
Capturing images in low light is the area Apple seems to have made the most significant advancement. A side-by-side comparison of a low-light photo taken of a colour scene on the original Air (left) and Air 2 (right) reveals the new model's greater reproduction of colours and low levels of noise (grain) induced by the lack of available illumination.
In good lighting conditions the most noticeable improvements regard colour depth and reduced noise (in addition to the physically larger images produced by the 8 megapixel sensor versus last year's 5 megapixel model). In the photo of the multi-coloured chicken, notice the stronger colours from the iPad Air 2's camera (right) versus the iPad Air's (left).
As a camera in its own right the iPad Air 2 is the first of Apple's tablets to be able to produce images good enough to replace a compact camera in many scenarios. Previously we would not have been happy taking only one device on holiday. But the iPad Air 2 changes this. Its improved low light performance, larger frame size and increased detail make it a worthy photographic tool for casual use -- much to the chagrin of anyone already sick of people holding 10-inch tablets up in tourist zones to take clumsy selfies.
Speaking of selfies, the front-facing camera has been improved as well. Picture quality is still nowhere near that of the rear camera but it's adequate for most situations. It can now take photos in burst mode, which makes it easier to isolate a sharp image if you're capturing pictures with a shaky hand; and it can also shoot high-dynamic range pictures to good effect.
On the video side of things the iPad Air 2 still captures Full HD video at 1080p and with 30 frames per second. Unlike the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, shooting at 60 frames per second for regular video is sadly not possible. Shooting at 120 frames per second is available within the new Slow Mo video option. As with the iPhone 5s, video shot in this mode is captured at 720p HD and can be smoothly slowed down to 30 frames per second, meaning action scenes can be played back at 25 percent of their regular speed without any loss of fluidity in the moving image. We made a mess of a local bathroom to demonstrate.
Software and cloud
The iPad Air 2 comes with iOS 8 by default, which is aesthetically identical to iOS 7 but with some much-needed improvements under the bonnet. Google's Android OS had for a long time had the edge over iOS in terms of flexibility and customisability. The Android world, with its more "open" and less restricted ideology, has long allowed users of devices like the Samsung Galaxy Note and Google's Nexus tablets to download new keyboards, have apps that can copy data to one another, build extensions directly into the operating system to allow easy sharing of content from any app to any supported web service. Many improvements along these lines have now finally come to iOS, and it makes the iPad Air 2 considerably more capable out of the box than the first iPad Air (although owners of the original can now upgrade to iOS 8 for free).
Apps can now talk to each other (meaning, for example, a camera app can offer to send the photo you have just taken straight to the Instagram app, or Safari can use passwords stored in 1Password rather than just Apple's keychain).
More than this, you can download new keyboards that offer innovating new ways to type (such as Swype; or SwiftKey, which can learn your conversation style from Facebook to offer predictive text when you compose emails etc); with an iPhone paired, iOS 8 lets you answer iPhone calls or receive and send regular SMS messages through the iPad if your phone is in another room (it works remarkably well in our tests); or start writing a novel on the train from work and immediately resume editing as soon as you set the device down next to your iMac or MacBook's keyboard. As partners, the iPad and iPhone are more easily useful together than a comparable pairing of two Android devices. Google is certainly making good ground in competing here, and its just-announced Nexus 6 and Nexus 9 devices, loaded with Android Lollipop, will raise the bar of competition.
But under Apple's execution, while arguably late to the game, many of iOS 8's improvements are features presented with consistent and easy-to-understand user interfaces that will become familiar to users from app to app to app. Learn once, use many. Similarly, because such features are only available to developers baking their new apps or updating existing ones, they don't over-tax Apple's hardware. That means they don't seem to eat battery life, memory or processing power. It's the classic Apple approach: be late if you want, but make sure you're better and easier.
The iPad Air 2 comes with a number of productivity and creativity software packages either pre-installed or available for free download. These include Pages (word processing), Keynote (slideshows), Numbers (spreadsheets), iMovie (video editing), GarageBand (music creation) and iPhoto (photography editing). These offer touch-friendly, yet powerful ways to work on the move. This reviewer regularly uses Pages as a primary word processor on the move to great effect, as when paired with a full-size Bluetooth keyboard the functionality on offer is as good as its near-identical desktop counterpart on Mac OS X. As a bundled extra it offers excellent value for money and supports all popular office formats for loading or export, such as Microsoft Word, Powerpoint and Excel.
A final bonus worthy of mention is iCloud. Its predecessor, MobileMe, was not a good product and Apple knows it. It was killed, and iCloud was born. Over the last few years it has grown and now offers basic email, contacts and calendars, as well as advanced web-based office productivity with online versions of Pages, Keynote and Numbers. For people working on multiple computers, such as in offices or schools, this is a very attractive bonus to owning an iPad. All documents and even photos loaded onto or created on the iPad Air 2 are mirrored into iCloud, allowing access, edits or sharing. Changes made in the cloud are reflected onto the iPad, and onto any other devices associated with an iCloud account. The consistent user interface design means there's no drawback in having to resort to a web-based word processor if the battery expires on the iPad or MacBook, or if a strict network administrator doesn't allow you to access the office Wi-Fi.
Conclusion
When we began this review 3,000 words ago, we wanted to determine whether the iPad Air 2 was as perfect in 2014 as the iPad Air was in 2013. The answer is yes. It has earned the same perfect score as its predecessor, making the iPad Air line the only two products to which we have ever awarded ten-out-of-ten. Its industrial design is a more refined version of the most accomplished iPad to date. Its power is so advanced, Apple will be onto the iPad Air 3 before most developers have even begun to be able to take advantage of the technology on offer. And its software has been baked so thoughtfully to work with OS X and the iPhone that there is serious benefit to owning all three -- no doubt Apple's intention of course, though it certainly isn't necessary to own any other Apple product to make the most of an iPad Air 2.
To do this for the same price as the original iPad Air is a remarkable achievement. For the hardware, slick operating system, range of apps on offer in the app store (nearly 700,000 for iPads alone at the time of writing), and the Apple-made bundled productivity apps, £399 is a bargain.
For many casual owners of an iPad Air, there's no single feature that would persuade us it's worth running out and replacing it immediately. Apple has kept that model on sale for a reason: it's still better than pretty much any other tablet out there. But what the iPad Air 2 offers is more potential to run the latest and greatest apps as they are developed, a significantly better camera experience, an even slicker design and gold colour option, stronger security options with the TouchID fingerprint sensor and an improved display. It would definitely be enough for us to warrant upgrading from the iPad 4 and older, as the Air really is a game-changer of a tablet line. But some soul searching will be needed to determine if there's enough value in security, photography and processing power to warrant the spend from a year-old generation to the new one.
The bottom line is this: the iPad Air was as close to perfect as we thought a tablet could be for 90 percent of users. The iPad Air 2 raises that to at least 95 percent.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
