Apple’s iPad Air 2 has launched and, unlike its more cautious little brother, the iPad Mini 3 (see page 40), it’s replete with enhancements and new features. In a year of near-everyday use, the original iPad Air hasn’t struck us as too fat or too heavy, but Apple has nevertheless sliced 6 percent off its weight and nearly 19 percent off its depth. It’s now just 6.1mm thick (down from 7.5mm) and weighs 437g (for the Wi-Fi version) or 444g (with 3G) – that’s down from 469g/478g.
The Air 2 is crazy-slim. And we mean that not entirely in a positive sense; shaving further millimetres off an already whisper-light chassis seems like an extravagance, and was presumably achieved at some cost – to battery size, and potentially to physical robustness. In our tests, it stood up to heavy use, though, it feels more fragile than its predecessor. And a little flexing showed there is more give than on the original iPad Air.
Aside from being slimmer, the physical design is very similar to its predecessor. The back edges are rounded, and there’s a brushedmetal effect across the back panel. The front edge has a sharp chamfer and a mirror finish, and looks smart.
The headphone socket and power-off button remain on the top of the device, the volume buttons are still on the upper right (though, they’re fractionally further apart, and therefore a touch easier to tell apart with a blind finger) and the SIM tray is still in roughly the same spot at the lower-right.
The microphone holes have, however, moved – they’re either side of the rear camera aperture. Another change is that the speaker grille along the bottom is now a single row of larger holes rather than a double row of smaller ones.
These are stereo speakers, as far as we can tell, but audio quality remains a weak point and the mute/orientation lock switch has gone. The device comes with iOS 8.1 preinstalled. It’s a highly optimised, user-friendly system that beginners find easy to grasp but offers a deep feature set for power users.
In use, we found it faster than the original iPad Air. Flipping from screen to screen, for example, and within apps is near-instantaneous.
Display
In many respects, the Air 2 has the same screen as its predecessor. The 9.7in display has a resolution of 2048x1536 and a pixel density of 264 pixels per inch (ppi). That’s the standard iPad Retina pixel density, and is very sharp to look at.
There are, however, a couple of differences from last season’s display. One is in terms of the iPad’s overall design. By compressing everything into a smaller form, Apple took out what it calls the “air gaps” between different elements of the screen. However accurate a description that is, it has translated into a screen that is firmer to the touch, and has (unlike the device as a whole) less flex. (One of our few dislikes when reviewing the first iPad Air was the way the display yielded to a finger tap a tiny but appreciable amount. That’s gone now.)
The second is the addition of an anti-reflective coating. Initially, we were sceptical, but this is great, darkening and minimising the distracting reflections that appear when using an iPad under electronic lighting.
Finally, the screen appears to be more responsive to the touch. It’s possible that the compressed design means that the touch-responsive elements are simply closer to the surface of the glass than before, creating the illusion that your fingers are touching and moving the visual elements displayed. Or this could be the effect of the new, more powerful processor and its superb graphical muscle. Either way, it’s a pleasure to use.
The Air 2 comes with a new chip – the A8X. It offers a 64-bit desktopclass architecture and three billion transistors. Thanks to this chip, the iPad is 40 percent faster than its predecessor. Even more impressive is the graphical side of things: Apple claims that users will see two-and-ahalf times the graphics performance.
That’s great news for gamers, and video- and photo-editing apps will also benefit from the enhanced graphics performance. The third in the Air’s triptych of enhancements (after the slimmeddown body and pumped-up chip) is the rear-facing camera, which has been boosted from 5- to 8Mp.
Your experience is likely to vary depending on the shooting conditions, and there will be areas where the Air 2 demonstrates its superiority – particularly close-up detail under studio lighting, and lowlight conditions – but don’t expect a quantum leap forward.
More appealing than the increase of megapixel rating, however, may be the new camera features that have been added. The Air 2 gets slow-mo and time-lapse video modes, as well as burst mode and a timer. And panoramas: the original Air had these, but they now go all the way up to 43Mp. Apple has also improved the FaceTime camera – it’s now HD and lets in 81 percent more light. Perfect for use in low light.
Less important than the big three improvements is the addition of Apple’s fingerprint scanner to the iPad line for the first time. (It also makes an appearance in the iPad mini 3.) Touch ID on the iPad is as straightforward and fast to use as it is on the iPhone. You can use it to unlock the device, to unlock various apps, and to verify purchases on the App Store. There are, of course, checks and balances – the first time you unlock the iPad after a power-down, you’ll need to input the passcode; ditto the first time you verify a purchase after setting up Touch ID. You can also use Touch ID for online shopping, as long as those sites and/or apps have Apple Pay implemented.
Apple appears to have concluded that people are unlikely to take their iPad shopping in the real world, so the most famous aspect of Apple Pay and Touch ID – the one where you touch your device on a sensor in a shop to pay for goods, as seen in the iPhone 6 and Apple Watch – has been disabled on the iPad Air 2.
As we touched on earlier, the Air 2 gets a stereo speaker setup, like the iPad mini line-up before it. (At least, we’re pretty sure it does – there’s still some debate about this, and Apple’s own specs only call them speakers.) About time, some audiophiles might say: yet the truth is that it might as well still be mono.
The speaker grilles are right next to each other, on the same edge of the device. (The lower edge, either side of the Lightning port.) It’s therefore almost impossible to create a situation in which the two sound sources can be heard separately. If you pop the iPad on its side and watch a movie with amazing sound design, prepare for disappointment: both speakers will be on the left (or the right) of the screen, and their output will be mashed together.
To provide good stereo sound, the iPad needs to have speakers on opposite sides. Of course, this would involve compromises in design, and it’s possible that Apple doesn’t think of the iPad as a serious audio device; and those who want stronger audio can invest in a wireless speaker or some decent headphones.
Moving away from the mono/stereo issue, the Air 2 produces sound that isn’t bad, though, it isn’t great either. It can manage quite a decent volume without quality degrading, but while you get a nice solid snap out of snare drums and similar, bass isn’t much to write home about. It’s a ‘thin’ sound, too – not something you’d call warm.
Battery life
There’s a smaller capacity battery inside the Air 2 – 27.3Wh compared to 32.4Wh in the original Air – although Apple specifies the same overall battery life of 10 hours of web surfing, video playback or music listening. We tried a more stressful test than browsing, using looped gameplay from GFXBench to play the T-Rex sequence, 30 times over. This gave an estimated total runtime of three hours, 53 minutes. For reference, we tried the same test on a year-old first-generation iPad Air. Both tablets were running the same build of the current latest iOS 8.1 software. Here the original Air posted an estimated total runtime of four hours, six minutes.
But it’s vital to also look at the performance of both products. Over the length of the test, the first Air could play at an average framerate of 22.9fps. Meanwhile, the Air 2 played at more than twice that speed, recording 48.3fps. This one test comes close to validating Apple’s claims for two-and-a-half times the graphics performance.
The new iPad Air 2 also offers better Wi-Fi connectivity than the previous generation, thanks to the inclusion of the latest 802.11ac technology. Another new area of connectivity is the addition of a removable SIM for the UK and US markets. This is designed to be as “flexible as possible,” according to Apple. It will, however, only work in the latest iPads. There will be no NFC in the iPads, though.
As it did with the iPhone 6 lineup, Apple has dropped the 32GB capacity option from the iPad Air 2 line-up. The tech giant told us that this was a strategy to bring the higher capacities down to a lower price point making it more affordable in that category.
When we asked why it had kept the 16GB model on (rather than replacing that with the 32GB model), Apple told us that 16GB has always been popular (due to the lower price we are sure). Unfortunately, it seems likely those people with 16GB devices are also the ones who’ve failed to install iOS 8.1. You will be able to buy a 32GB iPad Air, however.
Verdict
We’re a tiny bit concerned about how much physical punishment this slender creature will stand up to, but if you’re throwing your iPad around the place (or deliberately bending it), then you should probably expect to come unstuck anyway. Other than that, this is a lovely update of an already lovely device, with an improved camera, a considerably faster processor, a slimmer, more portable body and Touch ID. We might not recommend that owners of the first iPad Air upgrade – by the time the speed gains of the A8X are showing up in apps, we’ll be thinking about the iPad Air 3 – but if you’re on an iPad 4 or earlier, new to the world of iPads or just have a lot of cash to spare, jump in. J David Price
