Apple iPad Air 2 review: Quite simply the best tablet money can buy
Apple iPad Air 2 review: Quite simply the best tablet money can buy
The Apple iPad Air 2 remains the best tablet on the market, despite challenges from a host of Android-based rivals
A larger screen? Nope. A cheaper price? Nah. How about a base model with higher storage capacity? Not a chance. So what is the iPad Air 2’s headline feature? It’s thinner. That’s right, because that’s precisely the feature everyone had been clamouring for. “You know that iPad Air?” they all bleated, “I love it, but it’s just too fat.”
In fairness, Apple has made further changes, but it’s revealing that this was the feature it chose to lead on at the tablet’s official unveiling. Not a faster CPU, nor an improved display or camera, though it has those things as well, but the tablet’s astonishing slenderness. With a tablet so good – and still the market leader even a year after its first launch – it seems Apple has decided there simply wasn’t any reason to pile on new features.
All the same, with this new update, Apple has most certainly made its flagship tablet better, and the design department hasn’t been entirely unoccupied these past 12 months. Aside from the iPad Air 2’s slimmer 6.1mm chassis (the iPad Air was 7.4mm thick), and lighter 437g weight (down from 469g), a number of other small changes have been made: the buttons have been redesigned to match those on the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus; the speaker grille on the bottom edge is now a single row of larger perforations, not two; and the mute switch has been removed.
While some may mourn the demise of the latter, it’s no great loss as it’s still possible to quickly mute the tablet by simply holding the volume down key.
For those with a penchant for bling, the iPad Air 2 ushers in a gold version of the tablet. If this sounds a little too ostentatious, never fear; the Air 2 is still be available in silver and grey versions, as before.
Touch ID
You do have to look pretty hard to see most of the functional differences between this year’s Air and the last, but one of the more obvious is the introduction of Apple’s Touch ID sensor.
In look and operation, this works in exactly the same way as it does on the iPhone. To initially register a fingerprint, you repeatedly tap your finger to the sensor, then change the orientation of your finger and repeat the process. Once done, the iPad can be unlocked simply by holding a finger to the sensor.
You can also use the sensor to authorise payment for items purchased through the App Store or iTunes, and now that the system has been opened up to third parties, you can use it with other apps, too. Evernote was among the early adopters – you can use your fingerprint to sign in to the app – but there are now others as well, includiong LastPass and Dropbox.
Now that Touch ID has arrived, the big difference between the current crop of iPhones and iPads is that the iPads have no near-field communication (NFC), so there’s no direct support for touch-based payment. This is hardly a great loss, though; we can’t imagine that paying via an iPad, even one as slim and light as this, would be particularly convenient.
Display
The screen was great on the original iPad Air, and its vital statistics haven’t changed a jot here. It still measures the same 9.7in across the diagonal, and the Retina resolution of 1,536 x 2,048 delivers an identical pixel density of 264ppi. It looks just as sharp, and the quality is excellent: we measured maximum brightness at 401cd/m2, contrast at 1,019:1 with last year’s Air attaining an effectively identical 410cd/m2 and 1,000:1 in the same tests. Colour accuracy was excellent, too, with an average Delta E of 1.82, and the screen is capable of covering 93.3% of the sRGB gamut. It’s a superb panel.
Put the old and new tablets side by side, and you will see differences if you look closely enough. The iPad Air 2’s new anti-reflective coating means that reflections take on a less harsh appearance: where a light might look white when reflected in the iPad Air’s screen, it looks blue here – a little like looking through a pair of sunglasses.
The LCD screen is also now fully laminated to the glass above it, just as it is on the company’s smartphones, and this makes a noticeable difference both to the immediacy of the image and the perceived contrast. Graphics, text and photographs all look closer, more real on this display. Apple has also upgraded the chip that processes the touch input from the screen; it’s difficult to say definitively whether or not this has made an improvement, but we found that tasks such as scrubbing through a video timeline accurately did appear to be easier.
Cameras and speakers
The trend for people using their iPads to take photos and shoot video doesn’t seem to be going away, so Apple has finally caved in and brought the iPad’s camera into line with its iPhones, at least in terms of resolution. There’s no flash to match the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus’ True Tone flash, nor the superfast phase-detect autofocus, though.
The iPad Air 2’s camera is an 8-megapixel snapper, with an aperture of f/2.4 and a pixel size of 1.12 microns. Inevitably, it produces more detailed images than its predecessor, and larger files, too, but a close analysis of our test shots and video reveals there isn’t a huge difference in quality; images are just as clean in good light, and still look a touch grainy in low light. In fact, the main difference appears to be a tendency for the iPad Air 2 to overexpose images. They look a touch paler as a result, and we found ourselves dialling back in the contrast for most shots we captured.
The speakers aren’t improved, but surprisingly, given the thinness of the chassis, they go just as loud and there’s even a semblance of bass thump. Playing the same music clip on the iPad Air 2 then the iPad Air revealed the main difference is that the former sounds a touch harsher in tone, but it’s nothing to be concerned about.
The Air 2’s camera app does boast one significant feature that the original Air doesn’t: a 120fps slow-motion mode. The effect isn’t quite as dramatic as it is on the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, which have a 240fps mode, but it’s fun to play with nonetheless.
The front-facing camera has also seen an upgrade. It’s the same resolution as on the Air, but has a wider aperture than before. Images captured with it look just as detailed, but with slightly less bleached-out highlights.
Performance
Internally, the iPad Air 2 sees a number of dramatic new introductions, not least of which is the move, at last, from 1GB of RAM to 2GB. The A8X processor is new, too: it runs at up to 1.5GHz, has three physical cores and, according to Apple, is 40% faster than the A7. There’s also a new quad-core GPU, which offers a claimed 2.5x improvement in graphics speed. We wouldn’t argue with that: in Geekbench, a single core score of 1,683 represents a 14% improvement over the iPad Air, but when you get to the multi-core result the difference really becomes apparent: its score of 4,078 is 52% faster than the iPad Air.
In the real world this makes a big difference to compute-intensive tasks. We rendered a short iMovie project out to the Camera Roll on each device at 1080p; on the iPad Air 2 it took 12 seconds compared to 17 seconds on the Air. That might not sound like much, but bear in mind that the five seconds difference in this test works out at a time-saving of 29% overall, and when you’re rendering longer projects that could save chunks of time.
It should also make a difference to how much detail games developers can pack in per frame. In our usual GFXBench test, the tablet put in a flying display, gaining 53fps in the onscreen test – a much better result than the Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5’slowly 14fps, and a huge leap forward from the 21fps result of last year’s iPad Air.
We turned to 3DMark next, and in the Ultimate test the Air 2 returned 128fps in the most demanding of the graphics tests, with the original Air achieving 77fps. The Air 2’s overall score of 21,741 was bang-on 40% better than the Air’s 15,516.
Elsewhere, wireless speeds have also been boosted: the Air 2 now has dual-stream 866Mbits/sec 802.11ac, and 4G speeds are now faster too, at up to 150Mbits/sec for downloads.
In short, this is a hugely accomplished and fast tablet, and perhaps the most impressive thing about it is that despite the extra power, and a smaller battery inside, battery life has not been adversely affected. In our video-playback test, the Air 2 lasted 12hrs 46mins before expiring, a mere nine minutes short of the result the iPad Air achieved last year, and it’s just as good at retaining its charge. Leave this tablet in standby overnight, and when you switch it back on again in the morning it will have lost barely any of its battery capacity.
Apple SIM
One of the Air 2’s most intriguing new features is that the 4G version will come with an Apple SIM preinstalled. The SIM, which can be removed and replaced, will allow users to select from a number of different carriers and short-term contracts, making it quicker and easier to get online out of the box.
The Apple SIM will initially come only with iPads sold in the US and the UK, and the choice of networks isn’t great right now: in the US, T&T, Sprint and T-Mobile are on board, and in the UK it’s only EE. However, it is an interesting development. Could it be the first step towards a SIM-free future? We’ll have to wait and see.
Options, prices and verdict
It’s tough to criticise the iPad Air 2, because it’s a refinement of what was already the best tablet on the market. It’s slightly thinner and lighter, and has a better camera and a fingerprint reader for more convenient unlocking and payments. It’s much faster, too, and the screen is subtly improved.
The prices are no more expensive, either, the only difference being the withdrawal of the 32GB option: the iPad Air is now available only in 16GB, 64GB and 128GB Wi-Fi and 4G variants. We’d prefer to have seen the back of the 16GB model – that really isn’t enough capacity for a tablet that has no expansion potential – but the move does mean that the 64GB and 128GB versions are now cheaper.
The iPad Air 2 is definitively the best tablet on the market right now, which is why it replaces its predecessor on our A-List. But with prices as they are right now, it isn’t the best value. That status now belongs to the original iPad Air, which Apple, inexplicably, is currently offering in its 32GB guise for only £359.
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