It's difficult to improve something that's perfect. More difficult? Explaining how something we declared effectively perfect -- the iPad Air, the only product we've ever score ten-out-of-ten -- has actually been improved.
Alas, you find us squirming in this quagmire of a dilemma, because having just spent half an hour with the new iPad Air 2, we must concede the brilliant has become a bit better.
The king with all the money in the world just got a pay rise.
Hold me
One of the best thing about the iPad Air was its design. It was super thin, and light enough to hold in one hand sometimes; its screen was pin sharp and felt like the icons could pop out of the glass; the balance of performance to battery life was undeniably stellar; and the price was extremely competitive given all the above.
Enter the iPad Air 2: it's thinner, it's lighter, and in the hand it really feels it; the screen has the same resolution but icons and photos feel like they're even closer to you because there's less depth between the 10-inch glass screen and the pixels; by introducing the A8X chip Apple has boosted the potential for high performance even higher and promised the same battery life despite that; and the price? The same.
It's difficult to pick holes in that, and to briefly switch into first-person, I found it hard to find anything while testing the iPad Air 2 that wasn't at the very least equal to the original model. Moreover, I found the new thickness, updated screen and the performance on offer to be pleasing, noticeable and promising improvements respectively.
But that's what's important to remember at this point: they're improvements, and they're significant, but they're nonetheless relatively small evolutions of a creature that had already become the fittest for survival in the 2014 tablet jungle. The judge presiding of the law of diminishing returns seems to have smacked his gavel and declared the iPad guilty.
We needed to find some exceptions.
Finding the exceptions
The iPad Air's original camera performed admirably for a tablet, but didn't feature on a list of competitors to a decent compact shooter. This is a feature Apple seems to have tried to improve.
The image processing technology of the A8 chip in the iPhone 6 was one of the main reasons that device produces such great pictures; although it was acceptable in the original Air, this iPhone 6 image processing tech now appears in the Air 2. There's still no flash, but an improved ability to capture good photos in low-light conditions is a good compromise for a tablet. We couldn't test this in the well-lit Apple demo suite, but it's one of the first things we'll test in our full review. The camera also captures slow-motion video at 60fps, and we did test that: it works just like the iPhone 5s, which is to say it's effective but not as good as the iPhone 6.
The Air 2 also now has a fingerprint sensor on the home button, as the iPhone 5 and its descendants do. While an improvement and a welcome feature, it's something we actually think was a weird oversight in the first model since the iPhone already had it back then. Nonetheless, better late than never.
Apple builds a SIM city
But the best of the subtle features -- and one entirely missed by Apple's executives at today's launch -- concerns the SIM card in the 4G-ready model. It doesn't look like it has one. There's no SIM card slot.
Actually, it turns out it does, and it could be ingenious: Apple has baked a customised type of global SIM into the device itself.
On the surface this might look like another round of "build it in so you have to pay to replace it", but actually that might not be true. What we heard after the announcement today is that this allows Apple to sell you 4G data plans on the fly, on your device, in whatever country you're in. That means no more roaming charges because you can simply tell the iPad to use a pay-as-you-go contract-free Italian mobile network while you're in Italy, then delete that when you return home. This could be the single most exciting part of the iPad Air 2 for anyone who travels, and could be so significant as to warrant an upgrade from the original model on this basis alone.
This all leaves us to conclude that the iPad Air 2 sails on a raft of subtle improvements that leave us excited to take it for a lengthy cruise. But as to whether such changes warrant the upgrade fee from the previous model, that will be an opinion we save for our full review next week.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
